The Interference of Identical Particles Emitted by Sources of Different Sizes

Mauro Iazzi, Kazuya Yuasa

We discuss the interference in the two-particle distribution of the electrons emitted from two independent superconductors. It is clarified that, while the interference appearing in the antibunching correlation is due to the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect, that in the positive correlation due to superconductivity is intrinsically different and is nothing but the first-order interference of Cooper pairs emitted from different sources. This is the equivalent of the interference of two independent Bose-Einstein condensates.

G.I. Kopylov, S. S. Parzhitskii, M.I. Podgoretskii

V. V. Mityugov, V. P. Morozov

M. Moshińsky

IT is well known from experiment, as well as from classical theory, that strictly monochromatic light waves originating from different sources do interfere.' An example in which the waves are nearly monochromatic is found in the case of radio waves, and it is known that radio waves from two stations that have the same frequency show an interference effect. We may describe the phenomenon quantum mechanically if we represent the light quanta emitted by both sources by waves in Schroedinger configuration space. So long as we consider the quanta emitted by one source as different from those emitted by the other, the total wave function will be the product of the wave functions corresponding to the quanta emanating from both sources, and there will be no interference effect. In the present paper, we will see how things are changed when we symmetrize or antisymmetrize the wave function, i.e. assume either Bose or Fermi statistics for the particles. In the simple quantum mechanical picture that we will use here, we will assume a definite number of photons coming out from each source, and this implies that the phase relations will be undetermined.2 As a result, even the symmetrized wave functions must be expected to give, at any point in space, the same density of quanta that classical theory determines, when the intensity is averaged over the phase differences between the two sources. This implies that no interference is observed between the waves from the two sources. If we want to look for an interference effect when dealing with a quantum picture in which we have a definite number of photons, we must look for a phenomenon whose classical description should be independent of the phase. We shall make use of the fact that, in classical theory,

Pedro Sancho

The extended Dirac's principle describes the interference between different particles as an effect of the multiparticle system with itself. In this paper we present a novel example, based on the detection of particles emitted in multimode states by independent sources, which illustrates in a simple way the necessity of extending the original Dirac's criterion.

Wolfgang Radloff