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Physical Review

Interpretation of a Recent Experiment on Interference of Photon Beams

Louis de Broglie, J. Andrade E Silva

Published Aug 25, 1968• 49 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The interpretation of an important recent experiment by Pfleegor and Mandel according to the causal formulation of the wave-particle dualism is developed. This interpretation is simpler and seems more satisfactory than that provided by the current ideas on the nature of light.
DOI
10.1103/physrev.172.1284

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The Pfleegor-Mandel experiment showing the interference between two beams coming from two independent lasers is reviewed. It is argued that the interference fringes detected by Pfleegor and Mandel may not be caused by the interference, which is an interaction between the two beams. Instead of the interference between the two beams coming from two lasers, the following is suggested. The photons coming from the first laser interact with the environment of the path leading from the second laser, and the photons coming from the second laser interact with the environment of the path leading from the first laser. A modification of the Pfleegor-Mandel experiment that eliminates the possible interaction with the path from the other laser is proposed.
Pfleegor and Mandel produced interference effects from two separate independent laser beams when the quanta arriving at the detector were separated in time by an average of about 1.4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}${10}^{\ensuremath{-}7}$ sec. If the quanta are photons (particles), then, to produce interference, each photon must store energy in the detector for an average of at least 1.4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}${10}^{\ensuremath{-}7}$ sec. But J\'anossy and N\'aray have recently shown that over a period of 9\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}${10}^{\ensuremath{-}9}$ sec there is no such storage, at least when the phases are random. Thus the result of Pfleegor and Mandel is in conflict with the corpuscular concept of visible light.
In a recent article Jan Sperling, Syamsundar De, Thomas Nitsche, Johannes Tiedau, Sonja Barkhofen, Benjamin Brecht, and Christine Silberhorn discuss the wave-particle duality using an experiment to demonstrate that "neither the wave nor the particle description is sufficient to predict the utcomes of quantum-optical experiments." I would like to draw your attention to two previous papers that discuss feasible experiments in which a photon does not seem to behave either as particle or as wave and make some brief considerations on the topic.
The quantum theory has introduced physicists to two major counter-intuitive concepts. On the one hand, there is wave-particle duality, expressing the idea that objects normally described as particles can also behave as waves, while entities primarily described as waves, such as light, can behave as particles. This revolutionary idea nev- ertheless relies on concepts borrowed from classical physics, either waves or particles evolving in an ordinary space-time. On the other hand, entanglement can lead to interferences between the amplitudes of multi-particle states, which are described via Hilbert space and have no classical counter-part.This fundamental feature has of course been strikingly demonstrated by the violation of Bell’s inequalities. There is however, a conceptually simpler situation in which the interference between two-particle amplitudes entails a behavior impossible to describe by any classical model. This is the celebrated Hong Ou and Mandel experiment, in which two photons arriving simultaneously in the input channels of a beam-splitter always emerge together in one of the output channels. This effect has been extensively used to characterize the quality of non- classical light sources.Our group in Palaiseau has recently realized a Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment using metastable helium atoms [1]. A schematic diagram of the apparatus is shown in Fig. 1. We monitor the cross correlation signal between the two output ports ⟨nˆcnˆd⟩ as a function of the time t3 of application of the beam splitter. At this time we observe a 65% reduction in the cross correlation. This degree of supression cannot be explained by either a wavelike or particlelike description of the atoms.