It was recently argued that the pigeonhole principle, which states that if three pigeons are put into two pigeonholes then at least one pigeonhole must contain more than one pigeon, is violated in quantum systems [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 113, 532 (2016)]. An experimental verification of this effect was recently reported [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 116, 1549 (2019)]. In another recent experimental work, it was argued that two entities were observed to exchange properties without meeting each other [Nat. Commun. 11, 3006 (2020)]. Here we describe all these proposals and experiments as simple quantum interference effects where no such dramatic conclusions appear. Besides demystifying some of the conclusions of the cited works, we also present physical insights for some interesting behaviors present in these treatments. For instance, we associate the anomalous particles behaviors in the quantum pigeonhole effect to a quantum interference of force.
Recently, the investigations on the coherent tunnelling in a coupled quantum-dot (QD) system have carried out both experimentally (Blick et al., 1998, and Oosterkamp et al., 1998), and theoretically (Tsukada et al., 1997, and Wu et al., 2000). However, all of these studies did not take the influence of the measurement into account. It is well known that measurement itself will certainly induce dephasing. This effect was studied (Aleiner et at., 1997, Levinson, 1997, and E. Buks et al., 1998) in detail. Also, Gurvitz et al. (1996, 1997) derived modified rate equations and studied the dephasing effect induced by measuring the electron state in a coupled QD system via a quantum point contact.