Recent content by Erik Ayer

Here are some better diagrams to hopefully illustrate how the beam blocks work:

Right, H and V will both create interference patter but they will be shifted relative to one another. The light and dark parts add up to a uniform (or Gaussian) profile, but the interference patterns are still there, just obscured by the overlap.

I'm not sure I understand. D/A polarized light will be turned into left- and right-circular polarization (or vice-versa) and will not interfere - the paths are marked. For H and V, they align with the fast or slow axes of the QWPs, so there will be a shift in the phase through one slit or the...

In the MZ with QWPs below, the V input would be changed to left and right circular, marking which way photons went, and thus preventing interference. If, however, the input was diagonally polarized, it would remain diagonal but be slowed down in one path vs. the other. The arm lengths could be...

The density matricies for statistical mixtures of horizontal and vertical polarizations are the same as for mixtures of diagonal and anti-diagonal mixtures, so there should be no experiment that behaves differently for each mixture. I had an idea about it that's got to be wrong and am hoping...

Giant, cosmic brakes! The other possibility would be to build a bunch of particle accelerators that shot really big dirt clods out at reltavistic speeds to the east - and power them with billions of hampsters...

That site is really cool, thank you!

I would like to simulate both double-slit and Mach-Zehnder interference, with some other common optical components such as lenses, beam splitters, mirrors, and wave plates. Is there something online for this or a program that can be downloaded and run on either Linux or Windows? Thanks, Erik

Ha, I think I figured it out. For objects that are far from a lens, the light from a point on the object is close to parallel when it gets to the lens. If the object is close, then the light from a point on the object is not parallel. Where the image focuses will be different - I think...

I've been puzzling over this for a while and think I understand how photons with specific momenta are being selected. In the upper arm, the lens focuses all photons with a certain momentum to a certain spot in a plane at the focal length of the lens. So photons arriving at the center spot...

As I understand it, either coherence or entanglement can be in an experiment or some of each, varying continuously between the two. Because of this, coincidence detection is needed to pick out interference patterns among all the data. Coherence would refer to quantum waves of photons taking...

Okay, this makes complete sense. I had kind of come to understand it this way earlier but didn't explain my thoughts very well such that one could follow them. The concern about converting unpolarized light with the QWPs would not be a problem because there will always be a linear polarizer in...

Yes, this makes sense. It being an "English translation" implies that you are a native German speaker? Cool. I've studied the quantum eraser for more than a decade, but recently I gave a presentation to a meetup group - mostly engineers, including myself - and they asked me to write it up as...

I did read you explanation multiple times, and I 've just read it again a few more times but am still not understanding several things. Starting here: "Now you take only the case where the signal photon is polarized by using an appropriate polarization filter before the slits. Then all the...

I get the sense that I've been thinking of this all backwards. Here's the first diagram from the wikipedia page: How I've been thinking about it is that there would be a (linear) polarizer in the upper/idler path. It could be oriented in H or V, which would force the idler photon to be...