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Science

Creating and erasing quantum knowledge

J. Stajic

Published Jun 19, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum Mechanics Particles in the quantum world can also assume wavelike properties. Researchers often use photons to illustrate this particle/wave duality, but electrons interact with each other, which might make them a better choice. Weisz et al. used electrons to create a “quantum eraser” (see the Perspective by Feldman). By taking advantage of the electrons' interaction, the researchers first acquired information about the electrons' path—a process that destroys their wavelike properties. Next, they deliberately erased this information in order to recover the electrons' wave nature. Science , this issue p. [1363][1]; see also p. [1344][2] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1248459 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1255501

DOI
10.1126/science.344.6190.1354-e

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Quantum Mechanics
Particles in the quantum world can also assume wavelike properties. Researchers often use photons to illustrate this particle/wave duality, but electrons interact with each other, which might make them a better choice. Weisz et al. used electrons to create a “quantum eraser” (see the Perspective by Feldman). By taking advantage of the electrons' interaction, the researchers first acquired information about the electrons' path—a process that destroys their wavelike properties. Next, they deliberately erased this information in order to recover the electrons' wave nature.
Science , this issue p. 1363; see also p. 1344
The notion of wave-particle duality may be quantified by the inequality V2+K2< 1,{V}^{2}{+K}^{2}<~1,V2+K2< 1, relating interference fringe visibility V, and path knowledge K. With a single-photon interferometer in which polarization is used to label the paths, we have investigated the relation for various situations, including pure, mixed, and partially mixed input states. A quantum-eraser scheme has been realized that recovers interference fringes even when no which way information is available to erase.
Wave-particle duality is a bizarre feature at the heart of quantum mechanics which refers to the mutually exclusive dual attributes of quantum objects as the wave and the particle. Quantum eraser presents a counterintuitive aspect of the wave-particle duality. In this paper, we show that quantum eraser can be quantitatively understood in terms of the recently developed duality-entanglement relation. In other words, we show that wave-particle-entanglement triality captures all the physics of the quantum erasure. We find that a controllable partial erasure of the which-path information is attainable, enabling the partial recovery of the quantum interference and extending the scope of the conventional quantum eraser protocols.
1.1 Waves and particles in quantum mechanics In spite of the fact that the extraordinary progress of experimental techniques make us able to manipulate at will systems made of any small and well defined number of atoms, electrons and photons making therefore possible the actual performance of the gedankenexperimente that Einstein and Bohr had imagined to support their opposite views on the physical properties of the wavelike/particlelike objects (quantons) of the quantum world it does not seem that, after more than eighty years, a unanimous consensus has been reached in the physicist's community on how to understand their strange properties. Unfortunately, we cannot know whether Feynman would still insist in maintaining his famous sentence It is fair to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. We can only discuss if, almost thirty years after his death, some progress towards this goal has been made. I believe that this is the case. I will show in fact that, by following the suggestions of Feynman himself, some clarification of the old puzzles can be achieved. This chapter therefore by no means is intended to provide an impartial review of the present status of the question but is focused on the exposure of the results of more than twenty years of research of my group in Rome, which in my opinion provide a possible way of connecting together at the same time the random nature of the events at the atomic level of reality and the completeness of their probabilistic representation by the principles of Quantum Mechanics.
Quantum systems can display particle- or wavelike properties, depending on the type of measurement that is performed on them. The Bell-state quantum eraser is an experiment that brings the duality to the forefront, as a single measurement can retroactively be made to measure particlelike or wavelike properties (or anything in between). Here we develop a unitary information-theoretic description of this and several related quantum measurement situations that sheds light on the trade-off between the quantum and classical features of the measurement. In particular, we show that both the coherence of the quantum state and the classical information obtained from it can be described using only quantum-information-theoretic tools and that those two measures satisfy an equality on account of the chain rule for entropies. The coherence information and the which-path information have simple interpretations in terms of state preparation and state determination and suggest ways to account for the relationship between the classical and the quantum world.
Young’s double-slit experiment played a crucial role in establishing the wave nature of light. In this chapter, the shocking result that incident electrons yield a similar interference pattern as that formed by light waves is described. It is shown that the only way the experimental results could be explained is via a wave function description of electrons. It is also shown that, in the same experiment, the interference fringes disappear if the which-path information becomes available. This is the essence of wave–particle duality. The first of the Einstein–Bohr debates on wave-particle duality and Bohr’s principle of complementarity in the double-slit experiment is also discussed. Also presented are the counterintuitive notions of delayed choice and quantum eraser effects showing how the availability or erasure of information generated in the future can affect how the data in the present can be interpreted.
The quantum eraser is a device that illustrates the quantum principle of complementarity and shows how a dephased system can regain its lost quantum behavior by erasing the "which-path" information already obtained about it. Thus far, quantum erasers were constructed predominantly in optical systems. Here, we present a realization of a quantum eraser in a mesoscopic electronic device. The use of interacting electrons, instead of noninteracting photons, allows control over the extracted information and a smooth variation of the degree of quantum erasure. The demonstrated system can serve as a first step toward a variety of more complex setups.