Researchers at the University of Toronto have made significant advancements in quantum physics by demonstrating a method to directly measure the disturbance of a single photon’s polarization, challenging the long-standing Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Lead author Lee Rozema and Professor Aephraim Steinberg's team designed an innovative apparatus that quantifies the disturbance caused during measurement. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, suggest that Heisenberg's interpretation may have been overly pessimistic regarding measurement limitations in quantum mechanics.
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The principle has bedeviled quantum physicists for nearly a century, until recently, when researchers at the University of Toronto demonstrated the ability to directly measure the disturbance and confirm that Heisenberg was too pessimistic. "We designed an apparatus to measure a property – the polarization – of a single photon. We then needed to measure how much that apparatus disturbed that photon," says Lee Rozema, a Ph.D. candidate in Professor Aephraim Steinberg's quantum optics research group at U of T, and lead author of a study published this week in Physical Review Letters.