English

Three path interference using nuclear magnetic resonance: a test of the consistency of Born's rule

Quantum Physics 2012-12-04 v2

Abstract

The Born rule is at the foundation of quantum mechanics and transforms our classical way of understanding probabilities by predicting that interference occurs between pairs of independent paths of a single object. One consequence of the Born rule is that three way (or three paths) quantum interference does not exist. In order to test the consistency of the Born rule, we examine detection probabilities in three path intereference using an ensemble of spin-1/2 quantum registers in liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance (LSNMR). As a measure of the consistency, we evaluate the ratio of three way interference to two way interference. Our experiment bounded the ratio to the order of 103±10310^{-3} \pm 10^{-3}, and hence it is consistent with Born's rule.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.2321,
  title  = {Three path interference using nuclear magnetic resonance: a test of the consistency of Born's rule},
  author = {Daniel K. Park and Osama Moussa and Raymond Laflamme},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.2321},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

11 pages, 4 figures; Improved presentation of figures 1 and 4, changes made in section 2 to better describe the experiment, minor changes throughout, and added several references