Experimental observation of simultaneous wave and particle behavior in a narrowband single-photon wave packet

Hui Yan, Kaiyu Liao, Zhitao Deng, Junyu He, Zheng-Yuan Xue, Zhi-Ming Zhang, and Shi-Liang Zhu
Phys. Rev. A 91, 042132 – Published 30 April 2015
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  • INTRODUCTION
  • EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND THEORETICAL…
  • EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
  • DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    • References

    Abstract

    Light's wave-particle duality is at the heart of quantum mechanics and can be well illustrated by Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment: The choice of inserting or removing the second classical (quantum) beam splitter in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer determines the classical (quantum) wave-particle behavior of a photon. In this paper, we report our experiment on directly observing simultaneous wave and particle behavior in a narrowband single-photon wave packet by classically inserting or removing the second beam splitter when part of the wave packet passes through it. Our experiment demonstrates that the produced wave-particle state can be utilized in encoding quantum information.

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    • Received 9 December 2014

    DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.91.042132

    ©2015 American Physical Society

    Authors & Affiliations

    Hui Yan1,*, Kaiyu Liao1, Zhitao Deng1, Junyu He1, Zheng-Yuan Xue1, Zhi-Ming Zhang2, and Shi-Liang Zhu3,1,4,†

    • 1Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Engineering and Quantum Materials, School of Physics and Telecommunication Engineering, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China
    • 2Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Engineering and Quantum Materials, School of Information and Photoelectronic Science and Engineering, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China
    • 3National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China
    • 4Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China

    • *yanhui@scnu.edu.cn
    • †slzhu@nju.edu.cn

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    Issue

    Vol. 91, Iss. 4 — April 2015

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