Quantum mechanical which-way experiment with an internal degree of freedom

Predictability, distinguishability, and entanglement

Recent times have seen a spurt of research activity focused on “completing” certain wave-particle duality relations using entanglement or polarization. These studies use a duality relation involving path-predictability, and not path-distinguishability. Quantum origins of these results are explored here, in the more general framework of multipath quantum interference. Multipath interference with a path-detector is theoretically analyzed to find the connection between predictability and distinguishability. It is shown that entanglement is what quantitatively connects distinguishability with predictability. Thus, a duality relation between distinguishability and coherence can also be viewed as a triality between predictability, entanglement, and coherence. There exist two different kinds of duality relations in the literature, which pertain to two different kinds of interference experiments, with or without a path-detector. Results of this study show that the two duality relations are quantitatively connected via entanglement. The roots of the new, to the best of our knowledge, results in the classical optical domain, including the polarization coherence theorem, can be understood in the light of this work.

Faint trace of a particle in a noisy Vaidman three-path interferometer

We study weak traces of particle passing Vaidman’s nested Mach–Zehnder interferometer. We investigate an effect of decoherence caused by an environment coupled to internal degree of freedom (a spin) of a travelling particle. We consider two models: pure decoherence leading to exact results and weak coupling Davies approximation allowing to include dissipative effects. We show that potentially anomalous discontinuity of particle paths survives an effect of decoherence unless it affects internal part of the nested interferometer.

Wave-Particle-Entanglement-Ignorance Complementarity for General Bipartite Systems

Wave–particle duality as the defining characteristic of quantum objects is a typical example of the principle of complementarity. The wave–particle–entanglement (WPE) complementarity, initially developed for two-qubit systems, is an extended form of complementarity that combines wave–particle duality with a previously missing ingredient, quantum entanglement. For two-qubit systems in mixed states, the WPE complementarity was further completed by adding yet another piece that characterizes ignorance, forming the wave–particle–entanglement–ignorance (WPEI) complementarity. A general formulation of the WPEI complementarity can not only shed new light on fundamental problems in quantum mechanics, but can also have a wide range of experimental and practical applications in quantum-mechanical settings. The purpose of this study is to establish the WPEI complementarity for general multi-dimensional bipartite systems in pure or mixed states, and extend its range of applications to incorporate hierarchical and infinite-dimensional bipartite systems. The general formulation is facilitated by well-motivated generalizations of the relevant quantities. When faced with different directions of extensions to take, our guiding principle is that the formulated complementarity should be as simple and powerful as possible. We find that the generalized form of the WPEI complementarity contains unequal-weight averages reflecting the difference in the subsystem dimensions, and that the tangle, instead of the squared concurrence, serves as a more suitable entanglement measure in the general scenario. Two examples, a finite-dimensional bipartite system in mixed states and an infinite-dimensional bipartite system in pure states, are studied in detail to illustrate the general formalism. We also discuss our results in connection with some previous work. The WPEI complementarity for general finite-dimensional bipartite systems may be tested in multi-beam interference experiments, while the second example we studied may facilitate future experimental investigations on complementarity in infinite-dimensional bipartite systems.

Equivalence of wave-particle duality to entropic uncertainty

Interferometers capture a basic mystery of quantum mechanics: a single particle can exhibit wave behaviour, yet that wave behaviour disappears when one tries to determine the particle's path inside the interferometer. This idea has been formulated quantitatively as an inequality, for example, by Englert and Jaeger, Shimony and Vaidman, which upper bounds the sum of the interference visibility and the path distinguishability. Such wave-particle duality relations (WPDRs) are often thought to be conceptually inequivalent to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, although this has been debated. Here we show that WPDRs correspond precisely to a modern formulation of the uncertainty principle in terms of entropies, namely, the min- and max-entropies. This observation unifies two fundamental concepts in quantum mechanics. Furthermore, it leads to a robust framework for deriving novel WPDRs by applying entropic uncertainty relations to interferometric models. As an illustration, we derive a novel relation that captures the coherence in a quantum beam splitter.