Path Distinguishability in Double Scattering of Light by Atoms

Abstract

Wave-particle duality finds a natural application for electrons or light propagating in disordered media where coherent corrections to transport are given by two-wave interference. For scatterers with internal degrees of freedom, these corrections are observed to be much smaller than would be expected for structureless scatterers. By examining the basic example of the scattering of one photon by two spin-1/2 atoms--a case-study for coherent backscattering--we demonstrate that the loss of interference strength is associated with which-path information stored by the scattering atoms.

4 pages, 1 figure; version 2: address correction

References in corpus (5)

• Dephasing of Electrons in Mesoscopic Metal Wires
• Coherent light transport in a cold Strontium cloud
• Weak localization of light by cold atoms: the impact of quantum internal structure
• Light transport in cold atoms and thermal decoherence
• Thermal breakdown of coherent backscattering: a case study of quantum duality

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Mitigating the information degradation in a massive Unruh-DeWitt theory
• On the information behavior from quadratically coupled accelerated detectors
• Speckle intensity correlations of photons scattered by cold atoms
• Entanglement Witnesses from Single-Particle Interference
• Velocity effects slightly mitigating the quantumness degradation of an Unruh-DeWitt detector