Let me first start that i am sorry for my unclear and ambiguous writing. the discussion is frustrating for us both when i don't make it clear enough what i am talking about. I try my best to get better.
Cthugha said:
You are frequently using words and terms which mean something entirely different than what you seem to think they mean. This makes this discussion pretty hard.
For example The single photon interference" alone can refer to several dozens of different experiments
Oh... actually now that you say it out loud, i just noticed i was being an idiot not to notice how ambiguous "single photon interference" is. I am truly sorry for that, i mean i wasted quite a bit both of our time with this. Thanks for still trying answer me.
1) What i meant was an interference like in a Mach Zehnder interferometer at the second beam splitter where the source beam for the interferometer producing a beam with suited coherence length with a fixed polarization and wave length. Beam should be tuned to low intensities so that we only observe individual photons. Admittedly i am too far away from experimental physics to specify more about the light source usually used for these kind of experiments and i hope you tell me in if i am missing something. Second beam splitter needs to be setup such that the phases of the arriving beams are suited for interference, but i guess that's covered by the MZI setup.
My argument additionally needs to obtain statistics for just before the beams enter the second beam splitter, i.e. by placing photon detectors directly in front of it (this will of course absorb the photons, but i need all statistics of the beams before the interference).
2) The second experiment would use also a MZI setup, except that the first beam splitter would be exchanged for a mechanical rotated mirror with two configurations: one letting the beam pass unhindered, the other reflecting it by 90 degrees to go the other route. The mirror should randomly switch between those configurations. The idea is that this should produce an ensemble/mixed state for the second beam splitter.
But when i think of it, i guess there are probably much easier ways to achieve the same, i.e. putting the whole MZI in a cloud chamber should do the trick for the beams to lose coherence producing the same mixed state and results. And that should work for photons, too.
Cthugha said:
You have not had a single look at the reference I posted, did you?
Oh, sorry, i somehow indeed missed your last link and i honest i don't remember seeing the last part of your post. I fear work had made me quite tired and i must have lost attention, sorry for that. Or perhaps by any chance did you edit that part of your post and my browser showed me a cached outdated version?
Cthugha said:
No, you do not have to write the input states in some complicated combinations to find out what happens behind the beam splitter (unless of course you interfere both photons of an entangled pair on the same beam splitter). That is the simple part about it. You need to do that if you want to establish some correlations to what is happening to the partners. But the results you will get at the HOM side ALONE are completely given by what happens to the mixed states. The mixedness is even a good measure of how strong the entanglement in the state is. Sorry, but you are simply assuming something that is not there.
Okay, i know that this is the general consensus. My problem is that i don't see what would guarantee that to be true in general. The link you posted shows that a pure 2 qubit state reduces effectively to a mixed state when looking only at a single qubit. It demonstrates this in a "proof by example" way. However i know when considering only observables (like in the link) that you are right, this is still adequate in every possible case and that can be rigorously proven. But at the instance where we involve a time evolution, i.e. an unitary transformation, things become not as clear anymore.
If you could use arbitrary unitary trafos it's not difficult to construct a case where reducing the system onto single qubit subspace and applying the trafo afterwards yields inconsistent results compared with doing the same with the global pure state. This can be used to identify a trafo as non local. More precisely this article debates the issue probably much more comprehensibly then i do:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9906036.pdf.
Note that the link you gave me contains no mention whatsoever about time evolutions or other unitary transformation preceding the measurements, yet that is what undermines the assumption that it has no effect if you calculate it locally or globally.
Note also, that some people here suggest that QFTs should be capable to explain measurement in principle as regular physical interaction like any other without the need of an additional on top schema of measurement. That however would imply that its time evo operator in general requires to include some non locality to be able to achieve that. So if, QFTs were to come with some non-locality to boot, it's fair to ask if we can bring it to bear in any other instance other then classic measurement and i am wondering if the beam splitter trafo already might do it: given the complex structure of correlations it can produce for Bell states and alike it's very doubtful that it factorizes into a product of operators acting on the qubit sub-spaces in general (it may work for some states, but it's hard to achieve it for all) and if it doesn't it would imply it is non-local in general (but if one could sperate it, it would make calculations for entangled states significantly simpler, so one would do it?). Think of it this way: a photon detection looks just as much local, as beams going through a beam splitter but in QT that alone doesn't count for much. We have to query the math for such questions instead.
Again, i am really sorry my worked up posting made you use caps lock. i guess i deserved that. Even more thanks therefore for replying despite that.