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arXiv:quant-ph/0701226

Complementarity in a macroscopic observation

De-Zhong Cao, Jun Xiong, Hua Tang, Lu-Fang Lin, Su-Heng Zhang, Kaige Wang

Published Jan 30, 2007• 0 citations
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Abstract

Complementarity is usually considered as a phenomenon of microscopic systems. In this paper we report an experimental observation of complementarity in the correlated double-slit interference with a pseudothermal light source. The thermal light beam is divided into test and reference beams which are correlated with each other. The double-slit is set in the test arm, and the interference pattern can be observed in the intensity correlation between the two arms. The experimental results show that the disappearance of interference fringe depends on whether which-path information is gained through the reference arm. The experiment therefore witnesses the complementarity occurring in a macroscopic system.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0701226

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Complementarity is usually considered as a phenomenon of microscopic systems. In this paper we report an experimental observation of complementarity in the correlated double-slit interference with a pseudothermal light source. The thermal light beam is divided into test and reference beams which are correlated with each other. The double-slit is set in the test arm, and the interference pattern can be observed in the intensity correlation between the two arms. The experimental results show that the disappearance of interference fringe depends on whether which-path information is gained through the reference arm. The experiment therefore witnesses the complementarity occurring in a macroscopic system.
Complementarity is usually considered as a phenomenon of microscopic systems. In this paper, we report an experimental observation of complementarity in correlated double-slit interference with a pseudothermal light source. The thermal light beam is divided into test and reference beams which are correlated with each other. The double slit is set in the test arm, and an interference pattern can be observed in the intensity correlation between the two arms. The experimental results show that the disappearance of the interference fringe depends on whether which-path information is gained through the reference arm. The experiment therefore shows complementarity occurring in the macroscopic domain.
We experimentally investigate interference pattern formation in second-order intensity correlation considering the polarization state of pseudothermal light beams. By placing a double slit in one of the beams it is shown that the interference pattern depends on the polarization state of the light after the slits. When different parts of the double slit are aligned in different beams, we found that the interference is always observed, even for the case where the beams are orthogonally polarized. Our results are analyzed using a filtering process and indistinguishability of paths interpretation. Extensions of our findings to massive particles are also discussed.
We report an experimental demonstration of complementarity between path information and interference in second-order correlation with thermal light. The key apparatus is a Sagnac interferometer in which an off-axis slit is inserted. Two orthogonal thermal light beams travel through the slit clockwise and anticlockwise in the interferometer. The second-order interference fringes vanish when the path information is acquired. The interference fringes are revived when the path information is effaced.
We report on the experimental observation of interference pattern of a distributed double-slit, consisting of a single-slit and a wire spatially separated, illuminated by two beams from a pseudothermal light source, in Hanbury Brown and Twiss–like configuration. The interference pattern is obtained performing a classical correlation with the intensities of the light beams scattered by each part of the double-slit. A theoretical analysis confirms our experimental results, showing that classical correlations can also mimic non-local properties analogue to those using twin photons for quantum images.
A third-order double-slit interference experiment with a pseudothermal light source in the high-intensity limit has been performed by actually recording the intensities in three optical paths. It is shown that not only can the visibility be dramatically enhanced compared to the second-order case as previously theoretically predicted and shown experimentally, but also that the higher visibility is a consequence of the contribution of third-order correlation interaction terms, which is equal to the sum of all contributions from second-order correlation. It is interesting that, when the two reference detectors are scanned in opposite directions, negative values for the third-order correlation term of the intensity fluctuations may appear. The phenomenon can be completely explained by the theory of classical statistical optics and is the first concrete demonstration of the influence of the third-order correlation terms.