Complementarity controversy in wave-particle duality revisited

Dipankar Home

Arbab I. Arbab, Fatma Osman Mohamed

Peter Bokulich

Wolfgang P. Schleich

Iheka, Joy Ugochukwu

This project revisits wave-particle duality by simulating single-photon interference in a Mach–Zehnder interferometer using Python. Results from this research show that interference emerges not because photons are both waves and particles, but because their probability amplitudes add coherently in superposition, which simplifies the interpretation of complementarity and connects directly to modern applications of quantum photonics in communication and quantum information processing.

Peter D. D. Schwindt, Paul G. Kwiat, Andrew G. White

Summary form only given.The principle of complementarity, which describes the wave-particle duality of quanta, is one of the cornerstones of modern quantum theory. However, only recently has it been described quantitatively. Experimental verifications have been even rarer. Here we describe an experiment in which the quantified principle of complementarity is demonstrated for a variety of input quantum states, including mixed states.