English

Wave-Particle Duality in N-Path Interference

Quantum Physics 2017-09-08 v2

Abstract

Bohr's principle of complementarity, in the context of a two-slit interference experiment, is understood as the quantitative measures of wave and particle natures following a duality relation D2+V21{\mathcal D}^2+{\mathcal V}^2 \le 1. Here D{\mathcal D} is a measure of distinguishability of the two paths, and V{\mathcal V} is the visibility of interference. It is shown that such a relation can be formulated for NN-slit or NN-path interference too, with the proviso that the wave nature is characterized by a measure of {\em coherence} (C{\mathcal C}). This new relation, D2+C21{\mathcal D}^2+{\mathcal C}^2 \le 1 is shown to be tight, and reduces to the known duality relation for the case N=2N=2. A recently introduced similar relation (Bagan et al., 2016) is shown to be inadequate for the purpose.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.02849,
  title  = {Wave-Particle Duality in N-Path Interference},
  author = {Tabish Qureshi and Mohd Asad Siddiqui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.02849},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures, revised version, accepted in Annals of Physics

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:57:04.489Z