Related papers: Decoherence in a Two Slit Diffraction Experiment w…
We study C70 fullerene matter waves in a Talbot-Lau interferometer as a function of their temperature. While the ideal fringe visibility is observed at moderate molecular temperatures, we find a gradual degradation of the interference…
Interfering liquid surface waves are generated by electrically driven vertical oscillations of two or more equispaced pins immersed in a liquid (water). The corresponding intensity distribution, resulting from diffraction of monochromatic…
Matter-wave interferometry with solids is highly susceptible to minute fluctuations of environmental fields, including gravitational effects from distant sources. Hence, experiments require a degree of shielding that is extraordinarily…
Starting with a down to earth interpretation of quantum mechanics for a free particle, the disappearance and reappearance of interference in the 2 slit problem with a detector behind one are treated in detail. A partial interpretation of…
We seek to complement Nelson's work on the two-slit experiment by showing that the two-slit process, whose density exhibits the characteristic interference pattern, may be obtained as the model after the beam has reached the screen by means…
Stochastic backgrounds of gravitational waves are intrinsic fluctuations of spacetime which lead to an unavoidable decoherence mechanism. This mechanism manifests itself as a degradation of the contrast of quantum interferences. It defines…
The coherence effects induced by external photons coupled to matter waves inside a Mach-Zehnder three-grating interferometer are analyzed. Alternatively to atom-photon entanglement scenarios, the model considered here only relies on the…
Advances in micro-technology of the last years have made it possible to carry optics textbooks experiments over to atomic and molecular beams, such as diffraction by a double slit or transmission grating. The usual wave-optical approach…
According to a usual reading, decoherence is a process resulting from the interaction between a small system and its large environment where information and energy are dissipated. The particular models treated in the literature on the…
We propose an optical ring interferometer to observe environment-induced spatial decoherence of massive objects. The object is held in a harmonic trap and scatters light between degenerate modes of a ring cavity. The output signal of the…
Much of the discussion of decoherence has been in terms of a particle moving in one dimension that is placed in an initial superposition state (a Schr\"{o}dinger "cat" state) corresponding to two widely separated wave packets. Decoherence…
In absence of a lens to form an image, incoherent or partially coherent light scattering off an obstructive or reflective object forms a broad intensity distribution in the far field with only feeble spatial features. We show here that…
Making a "which-way" measurement (WWM) to identify which slit a particle goes through in a double-slit apparatus will reduce the visibility of interference fringes. There has been a long-standing controversy over whether this can be…
These lecture notes discuss two effects which contribute to the reduction of the interference fringe contrast in matter interferometers. The first effect is the shot noise arising from a finite number of atoms used in experiments. Focusing…
Fraunhofer diffraction plays a vital role in experimental physics not only because it accurately describes the behaviour of light in the usual propagation limit, but also because it links the diffracted light with the scattering object…
An experimental study is conducted to show the effect of the change in bandwidth of light on the spectral degree of coherence at a pair of points in the cross-section of a beam. For this purpose a polychromatic source and a monochromator…
The interference between resonance signal and continuum background can be either constructive or destructive, depending on the relative sign of couplings between the signal and background amplitudes. Different interference schemes lead to…
In a recent article, Ford, Lewis and O'Connell (PRA 64, 032101 (2001)) discuss a thought experiment in which a Brownian particle is subjected to a double-slit measurement. Analyzing the decay of the emerging interference pattern, they…
We report a two-photon interference experiment in which the detected photons have very different properties. The interference is observed even when no effort is made to mask the distinguishing features before the photons are detected. The…
We consider the possibility to measure the quantum decoherence using gravitational wave interferometers. Gravitational wave interferometers create the superposition state of photons and measure the interference of the photon state. If the…