The quantitative formulation of Bohr's complementarity proposed by Greenberger and Yasin is applied to some physical situations for which analytical expressions are available. This includes a variety of conventional double-slit experiments, but also particle oscillations, as in the case of the neutral-kaon system, and Mott scattering of identical nuclei. For all these cases, a unified description can be achieved including a new parameter $\ensuremath{\nu},$ which quantifies the effective number of fringes one can observe in each specific interferometric setup.
The quantitative formulation of Bohr's complementarity proposed by Greenberger and Yasin is applied to some physical situations for which analytical expressions are available. This includes a variety of conventional double-slit experiments, but also particle oscillations, as in the case of the neutral-kaon system, and Mott scattering of identical nuclei. For all these cases, a unified description can be achieved including a new parameter \ensuremathν, which quantifies the effective number of fringes one can observe in each specific interferometric setup.
A detailed analysis of Einstein's version of the double-slit experiment, in which one tries to observe both wave and particle properties of light, is performed. Quantum nonseparability appears in the derivation of the interference pattern, which proves to be surprisingly sharp even when the trajectories of the photons have been determined with fairly high accuracy. An information-theoretic approach to this problem leads to a quantitative formulation of Bohr's complementarity principle for the case of the double-slit experiment. A practically realizable version of this experiment, to which the above analysis applies, is proposed.
Besides Heisenberg uncertainty, entanglement is another mechanism that can enforce complementarity in multipartite quantum systems. Analysing its effects in a bipartite system of two qubits, M. Jakob and J. Bergou had shown that the usual wave-particle duality relation, in interferometric systems, regarding which-way information and interference visibility, should be extended to a ¿triality¿ relation containing, in addition, a quantitative entanglement measure. Employing a model for the neutral K-meson propagation in free space in which its weak decay products are included as a second party, we study its effect in the neutral kaon interferometry. We show that a new quantitative triality relation can also be established in this case. The state of the total system remains pure in the course of dynamics, so, we can use the von Neumann entropy of a reduced party as a quantitative measure of entanglement. The other two quantities in the triality relation are the distinguishability between the decay products states corresponding to the two distinct kaon propagation modes KS and KL, and the wave-like path interference between these states. These two distinct modes are the analogues to the two separated paths in usual interferometric devices. The inequality obtained here can account for the complementarity between strangeness oscillations and lifetime information previously considered in the literature. Moreover, it allows us to visualise through the K0 ¿ K0 oscillations the fundamental role of entanglement in quantum complementarity.
Different types of Young's double-slit experiments contain a significant amount of both particle and wave information running from full-particle to full-wave knowledge depending on the experimental conditions. We study the Young's double-slit interference in resonant Auger scattering from homonuclear diatomic molecules where opposite Doppler shifts for the dissociating atomic slits provide path information. Different quantitative formulation of Bohr's complementarity principle—path information vs interference—is applied to two types of resonant Auger scattering experiments, with fixed-in-space and randomly oriented molecules. Special attention is paid to the orientational dephasing in conventional Auger experiments with randomly oriented molecules. Our quantitative formulation of the complementarity is compared with the formulation made earlier by Greenberger and Yasin [D. M. Greenberger and A. Yasin, ].
Updating the wave-particle duality Maria C. Bosca e-mail: bosca@ugr.es Departamento de Fisica Atomica, Molecular y Nuclear Universidad de Granada E-18071. Granada Spain The wave-particle-duality, the fundamental component of the new quantum formalism in Bohr’s opinion, must be reformulated by incorporating the results of some experiments accomplished in the last decades of twentieth century. The Bohr´s complementarity principle stated the mutual exclusiveness and joint full completeness of the two (classical) descriptions of quantum systems; after Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen’paper, the wave-particle duality, or wave-particle complementarity, could be expressed by stating that it is impossible to build up an experimental arrangement in which we observe at the same time both corpuscular and wave aspects. In a two-slit experiment, they would correspond, respectively, to the which-way knowledge and the observation of interference pattern. Bohr showed this mutual exclusivity in numerous examples , and linked it to the unavoidable disturbance inherent in any measurement event. In quantum mechanical formalism, the complementarity principle has a clear mathematical expression: two observables are complementary if precise knowledge of one of them implies that all possible outcomes of the other are equally probable; their extension to classical concepts (as wave and particle) is not concerned. In 1991 Scully et al published a variant of the two-slit experiment that incorporates two micromasers cavities and a laser beam to provide which-path information without net momentum transferred during the interaction ; the impossibility of know which slit an atom went through and still observe the interference fringes is preserved by the establishing of quantum correlations between the measuring apparatus and the system being observed. They claimed that complementarity, of which wave-particle duality would be to them a manifestation, is more fundamental than the uncertainty principle . In 1996 B-G. Englert, following an approach originally due to Wooters and Zurek , derived , without making use of Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation, an inequality that quantifies the mutual compatibility relation between fringe visibility and which-way information. The inequality, that they denominated as “interferometric duality”, has the expression D^2 + V^2 ≤ 1, where D stands for the distinguishability of the ways and V for the fringe visibility; both of them are mathematical expressions that can be measured to check experimentally the inequality . Today, it is clear that intermediate particle-wave behaviours exist and, in addition to that, there are single experiments in which both classical wave-like and particle-like behaviours are showed total and simultaneously on an individual system. For instance, in the Bose’s double-prism experiment , tunnelling and perfect anticoincidence were observed in single photon states. Consequently, the meaning of the wave-particle duality must incorporate the simultaneous use of the two classical descriptions in the interpretation of experiments, loosing their original mutual exclusivity , which is incorporated as an extreme case in the new interferometric duality, a continuous quantum concept . The wave-particle duality, therefore, must be formulated as an interpretative addition to quantum mechanics, to which is possible to renounce if any pretension of visualize quantum phenomena in terms of classical concepts and intuitions is abandoned.
Starting from the recoiling double slit gedanken experiment, protagonist of the debates between Einstein and Bohr, we study the main steps that led to the discussion of the complementarity between path information and interference visibility at intermediate domains, where each quantity is partially known. Trying to highlight the strategies of quantification of path knowledge, we emphasize the existence of two regimes of complementarity. The first regime, which leads to the formulation of Greenberger-Yasin duality, is based on predictive strategies. The second one, which leads to the formulation of Englert-Greenberger-Yasin duality (EGY), is based on the retrodiction of the path through the result of a measurement on an auxiliary system. In this second regime, we stress the point that the description of the auxiliary system through nonorthogonal quantum states is the essential ingredient in the derivation of EGY duality. Thus, the quantitative study of complementarity opens space for a close relationship with the strategies of discrimination of quantum states, which for a long time was mentioned in the literature only in a very subtle way. In addition, we also study recent works, which make use of a coherence quantifier and take important steps in obtaining interferometric dualities in a multipath scenario. At the end we present a preliminary form of generalization of these works in a three-way interferometer.