Violation of the Principle of Complementarity and Its Implications

Kalervo V. Laurikainen

Shahriar S. Afshar

Bohr's principle of complementarity predicts that in a welcher weg ("which-way") experiment, obtaining fully visible interference pattern should lead to the destruction of the path knowledge. Here I report a failure for this prediction in an optical interferometry experiment. Coherent laser light is passed through a dual pinhole and allowed to go through a converging lens, which forms well-resolved images of the respective pinholes, providing complete path knowledge. A series of thin wires are then placed at previously measured positions corresponding to the dark fringes of the interference pattern upstream of the lens. No reduction in the resolution and total radiant flux of either image is found in direct disagreement with the predictions of the principle of complementarity. In this paper, a critique of the current measurement theory is offered, and a novel nonperturbative technique for ensemble properties is introduced. Also, another version of this experiment without an imaging lens is suggested, and some of the implications of the violation of complementarity for another suggested experiment to investigate the nature of the photon and its "empty wave" is briefly discussed.

Osvaldo Frota Pessoa Junior

Emory Taylor, Rajan N. Iyer

The atomic absorption and emission process that uses noninstantaneous electronic transitions of the atomic electron (i.e., electric charge), the tangent reference system, the property of speed instantaneity, and the conservation laws leads to a violation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and it is maintained in the atomic absorption and emission process discontinuity that is conserved as the emitted photon's (i.e., electromagnetic radiation's) discontinuity. This leads to a falsification of Bohr's complementary principle that aligns with Einstein's 1909 falsification of it. The violation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and falsification of Bohr's complementarity principle falsify the Copenhagen interpretation, because it requires Heisenberg's uncertainty principle not to be violated and Bohr's complementarity principle not to be falsified.

John T. Holmes

Yang 阳 Xiang 向

We first present, by using exclusivity principle, a brief proof of the complementarity principle: the sum of squared expectation values of dichotomic (±1) mutually complementary observables can not be greater than 1. Then we prove that the complementarity principle yields tight quantum bounds of violations of N-qubit Svetlichny's inequalities. This result not only demonstrates that exclusivity principle can give tight quantum bound for certain type of genuine multipartite correlations, but also illustrates the subtle relationship between quantum complementarity and quantum genuine multipartite correlations.