Related papers: Modified Two-Slit Experiments and Complementarity
We analyze an experiment in which a thin wire is scanned across the overlap of two in phase photon beams. We find that unless the wire induces the formation of an interference pattern, the complementarity inequality is violated. Quantum…
The geometric phase is usually treated as a quantity modulo 2\pi, a convention carried over from early work on the subject. The results of a series of optical interference experiments involving polarization of light, done by the present…
Taking recent experiments as examples, we discuss the conditions for sub-wavelength probing of optical field structures by single trapped atoms. We calculate the achievable resolution, highlighting its connection to the fringe visibility in…
Complementarity, the incomplete nature of a quantum measurement - a core concept in quantum mechanics - stems from the choice of the measurement apparatus. The notion of complementarity is closely related to Heisenberg's uncertainty…
In this paper we look at a particular realization of Popper's thought experiment with correlated quantum particles and argue that, from the point of view of a nonlinear quantum physics and contrary to the orthodox interpretation,…
This article presents an experiment that can be conducted today and that could provide a deeper understanding of the interaction between the wave and particle aspects of an atom. The wave-particle duality is often presented as mutually…
The concept of wave-particle duality, which is a key element of quantum theory, has been remarkably found to manifest itself in several experimental realizations as in the famous double-slit experiment. In this specific case, a single…
One of the central principles of quantum mechanics is that if there are multiple paths that lead to the same event, and there is no way to distinguish between them, interference occurs. It is usually assumed that distinguishing information…
To investigate the effect of a classical environment on a quantum mechanical system we consider two two-level atoms in a free radiation field in the presence of a screen. By assuming that the screen causes continuous ideal measurements on…
Wave-particle duality epitomizes the counterintuitive character of quantum physics. A striking illustration is the quantum delay-choice experiment, which is based on Wheeler's classic delayed-choice gedanken experiment, but with the…
We consider fits to two or more datasets for which results from the sa me experiment share a common systematic uncertainty in addition to their individ ual statistical errors. This is important in extracting the maximum information from a…
We analyze the notion of quantum coherence in an interference experiment. We let the phase shifts fluctuate according to a given statistical distribution and introduce a decoherence parameter, defined in terms of a generalized visibility of…
The visibilities of second-order (single-photon) and fourth-order (two-photon) interference have been observed in a Young's double-slit experiment using light generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion and a photon-counting…
For a particle travelling through an interferometer, the trade-off between the available which-way information and the interference visibility provides a lucid manifestation of the quantum mechanical wave-particle duality. Here we analyze…
We show that the two slit experiment in which a single quantum particle interferes with itself can be interpreted as a quantum fingerprinting protocol: the interference pattern exhibited by the particle contains information about the…
It was recently proposed that the fringe visibility in the interference pattern of a double-slit diffraction experiment with a HeNe laser beam was reduced as a consequence of the focused attention of participants on the double-slit that…
A phase space formulation of the filtering process upon an incident quantum state is developed. This formulation can explain the results of both quantum interference and delayed-choice experiments without making use of the controversial…
It is shown theoretically and experimentally that passage of a laser beam through particular conventional Ronchi gratings prepares the beam in an altered state that violates quantum duality. The violation is characterized by a readily…
In this paper, we analyze the statistics of detection data in a general double-double-slit experiment. The two particles are detected at random times which are not equal in general and because we do not have any constraint on the distances…
The probabilistic interference fringes observed in the double slit experiment vividly demonstrate the quantum superposition principle, yet they also highlight a fundamental conceptual challenge: the relationship between a system before and…