Observation of PT-symmetric quantum interference
Abstract
Parity-Time (PT) symmetric quantum mechanics is a complex extension of conventional Hermitian quantum mechanics in which physical observables possess a real eigenvalue spectrum. However, an experimental demonstration of the true quantum nature of PT symmetry has been elusive thus far, as only single-particle physics has been exploited to date. In our work, we demonstrate two-particle quantum interference in a PT-symmetric system. We employ integrated photonic waveguides to reveal that PT-symmetric bunching of indistinguishable photons shows strongly counterintuitive features. We substantiate our experimental results by modelling the system by a quantum master equation, which we analytically solve using Lie algebra methods. Our work paves the way for nonlocal PT-symmetric quantum mechanics as a novel building block for future quantum devices.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1904.08135,
title = {Observation of PT-symmetric quantum interference},
author = {Friederike U. J. Klauck and Lucas Teuber and Marco Ornigotti and Matthias Heinrich and Stefan Scheel and Alexander Szameit},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.08135},
year = {2020}
}