Observing photonic de Broglie waves without the NOON state
arXiv:0910.5797 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.81.063801
Abstract
The photonic de Broglie wave, in which an ensemble of identical photons with wavelength reveals interference fringes, has been known to be a unique feature exhibited by the photon number-path entangled state or the NOON state. Here, we report the observation of the photonic de Broglie wave for a pair of photons, generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion, that are not photon number-path entangled. We also show that the photonic de Broglie wave can even be observed for a pair of photons that are completely separable (i.e., no entanglement in all degrees of freedom) and distinguishable. The experimental and theoretical results suggest that the photonic de Broglie wave is, in fact, not related to the entanglement of the photons, rather it is related to the indistinguishable pathways established by the measurement scheme.
9 pages, 6 figures
References in corpus (11)
- Super-resolving phase measurements with a multi-photon entangled state
- Beating the Standard Quantum Limit with Four Entangled Photons
- Experimental evidence of high-resolution ghost imaging and ghost diffraction with classical thermal light
- Two-photon diffraction and quantum lithography
- Heralded Generation of Ultrafast Single Photons in Pure Quantum States
- De Broglie Wavelength of a Nonlocal Four-Photon
- Time-reversal and super-resolving phase measurements
- Measurement of the photonic de Broglie wavelength of biphotons generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion
- Experimental Observation of Classical Sub-Wavelength Interference with Thermal-Like Light
- Beating the standard quantum limit: Phase super-sensitivity of N-photon interferometers
- A Bootstrapping Approach for Generating Maximally Path-Entangled Photon States