Controlling wave-particle duality with entanglement between single-photon and Bell states
- Author(s)
- Kai Wang, Daniel R. Terno, Časlav Brukner, Shining Zhu, Xiao Song Ma
- Abstract
Wave-particle duality and entanglement are two fundamental characteristics of quantum mechanics. All previous works on experimental investigations in wave-particle properties of single photons (or single particles in general) showed that a well-defined interferometer setting determines a well-defined property of single photons. Here we take a conceptual step forward and control the wave-particle property of single photons with a Bell state. By doing so, we experimentally test the complementarity principle in a scenario in which the setting of the interferometer is not defined at any instance of the experiment, not even in principle. To achieve this goal, we establish the three-photon entangled state, i.e., the entanglement between a single photon and a two-photon Bell state, send the photon of interest S into a quantum Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), in which the output beam splitter of the MZI is controlled by the quantum state of the second photon C, which is entangled with a third photon A. Therefore, the individual quantum state of photon C is undefined, which implements the undefined settings of the MZI for photon S. This is realized by using three cascaded phase-stable interferometers for three photons. There is typically no well-defined setting of the MZI and thus the very formulation of the wave-particle objectivity from local hidden variable models becomes internally inconsistent.
- Organisation(s)
- Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics and Quantum Information
- External organisation(s)
- Nanjing University, Macquarie University, Southern University of Science and Technology, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW), University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)
- Journal
- Physical Review A
- Volume
- 106
- No. of pages
- 10
- ISSN
- 2469-9926
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.106.053715
- Publication date
- 11-2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103026 Quantum optics, 103025 Quantum mechanics
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/controlling-waveparticle-duality-with-entanglement-between-singlephoton-and-bell-states(d478279f-534f-4252-9933-63c465224ad8).html