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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Nonmonotonic quantum-to-classical transition in multiparticle interference

Young-Sik Ra, Malte C. Tichy, Hyang‐Tag Lim, Osung Kwon, Florian Mintert, Andreas Buchleitner, Yoon-Ho Kim

Published Feb 19, 2014• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate the non-monotonic dependence of genuine many-particle interference signals on the particles' mutual distinguishability. Our theoretical analysis shows that such non-monotonicity is a generic feature of the quantum to classical transition in multiparticle correlation functions of more than two particles.
DOI
10.1117/12.2045367

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Quantum-mechanical wave-particle duality implies that probability distributions for granular detection events exhibit wave-like interference. On the single-particle level, this leads to self-interference--e.g., on transit across a double slit--for photons as well as for large, massive particles, provided that no which-way information is available to any observer, even in principle. When more than one particle enters the game, their specific many-particle quantum features are manifested in correlation functions, provided the particles cannot be distinguished. We are used to believe that interference fades away monotonically with increasing distinguishability--in accord with available experimental evidence on the single- and on the many-particle level. Here, we demonstrate experimentally and theoretically that such monotonicity of the quantum-to-classical transition is the exception rather than the rule whenever more than two particles interfere. As the distinguishability of the particles is continuously increased, different numbers of particles effectively interfere, which leads to interference signals that are, in general, nonmonotonic functions of the distinguishability of the particles. This observation opens perspectives for the experimental characterization of many-particle coherence and sheds light on decoherence processes in many-particle systems.
Multiparticle interference is a fundamental phenomenon in the study of quantum mechanics. It was discovered in a recent experiment [Y.-S. Ra et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 110, 1227 (2013)] that spectrally uncorrelated biphotons exhibited a nonmonotonic quantum-to-classical transition in a four-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference. In this work, we consider the same scheme with spectrally correlated photons. By theoretical calculation and numerical simulation, we found the transition not only can be nonmonotonic with negatively correlated or uncorrelated biphotons, but also can be monotonic with positively correlated biphotons. The fundamental reason for this difference is that the HOM-type multiphoton interference is a differential-frequency interference. Our study may shed new light on understanding the role of frequency entanglement in multiphoton behavior.
A recent work (Björk and Shabbir 2014 New J. Phys. 16 013006 ) claims that nonmonotonic structures found in the many-particle quantum-to-classical transition (Ra et al 2013 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110 1227–31 ; Tichy et al 2011 Phys. Rev. A 83 062111 ) are not exclusive to the many-body domain, but they also appear for single-photon as well as for semi-classical systems. We show that these situations, however, do not incorporate any quantum-to-classical transition, which makes the claims unsustainable.