Erik Ayer
- 78
- 4
- TL;DR
- Found a PDF on this, but it's a little beyond me
It seems to be quite difficult to find information on this phenomena, although there are a couple cases of people asking about it. From what I understand, if downconverted light is sent through something to create interference such as a double-slit or Mach-Zehnder interferometer, there will be both fringes and anti-fringes necessitating the use of coincidence detection. But what, physically, is happening?
If light is sent through a double-slit, getting an anti-interference pattern implies an additional pi phase shift between the slits. For a MAch Zehnder interferometer, there would need to be an extra pi phase shift in the two paths. The quantum eraser creates this through the use of polarization filters in front of the slits, and sending the entangled beam to a diagonal polarization filter, so that one kind of makes sense. From what I understand, the problem is more widespread in that there will always be anti-fringes. That comes from this complimentarity of 1-2 particle interference. What is that, and how does it make this extra pi phase shift happen?
If light is sent through a double-slit, getting an anti-interference pattern implies an additional pi phase shift between the slits. For a MAch Zehnder interferometer, there would need to be an extra pi phase shift in the two paths. The quantum eraser creates this through the use of polarization filters in front of the slits, and sending the entangled beam to a diagonal polarization filter, so that one kind of makes sense. From what I understand, the problem is more widespread in that there will always be anti-fringes. That comes from this complimentarity of 1-2 particle interference. What is that, and how does it make this extra pi phase shift happen?