Interferometry with de Broglie Waves

Christopher Dewdney, A. Kypeianidis, Jean Pierre Vigier +2 more

Saijun Wu, Edward Su, Mara Goff Prentiss

Thomas Juffmann, Stefan Nimmrichter, Markus Arndt +2 more

Stephen Mark Barnett, Nobuyuki Imoto, B. Hüttner

In the recently proposed photonic de Broglie wave interferometer, sophisticated beam splitters are used to split the de Broglie wave of a set of photons. The photonic de Broglie or collective phase shift can, however, be found in conventional interferometry if the full photon statistics are recorded. We propose a variation of the original photonic de Broglie wave interferometer. We show that the collective phase shift can and has been found in interferometry using photon pairs and propose two new photonic de Broglie wave interferometers in which normal beam splitters are used. Both of these rely on conditioning to select the cases for which all the photons behave as a single object.

FRANZ HASSELBACH, Harald Kiesel, Peter Sonnentag

Louis de Broglie's discovery of the wave nature of matter 80 years ago and the subsequent development of quantum mechanics by Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac solved many riddles of those days and determined physics of the whole 20th century. Yet, after this long time, matter wave interferometry is as up to date as it was in 1927 when Louis de Broglie's hypothesis was verified, e.g., by Davisson and Germer. Atom interferometry, ion interferometry and Bose-Einstein condensates are today's fascinating applications based on de Broglie's discovery. The focus of the present contribution are Hanbury Brown-Twiss anti-correlations (i.e. interferences between two fermions (electrons)) and the quantitative observation of decoherence by electron biprism interferometry.