Experimental Test of Relation between Coherence and Path Information

Abstract

Quantum coherence stemming from the superposition behaviour of a particle beyond the classical realm, serves as one of the most fundamental features in quantum mechanics. The wave-particle duality phenomenon, which shares the same origin, has a strong relationship with quantum coherence. Recently, an elegant relation between quantum coherence and path information has been theoretically derived. Here, we experimentally test such new duality by l1-norm measure and the minimum-error state discrimination. We prepare three classes of two-photon states encoded in polarisation degree of freedom, with one photon serving as the target and the other photon as the detector. We observe that wave-particle-like complementarity and Bagan's equality, defined by the duality relation between coherence and path information, is well satisfied. Our results may shed new light on the original nature of wave-particle duality and on the applications of quantum coherence as a fundamental resource in quantum technologies.

6 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Measuring Quantum Coherence with Entanglement
• Experimental demonstration of wave-particle duality relation based on coherence measure
• Experimental generation of a high-fidelity four-photon linear cluster state

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• Simulation of wave-particle duality in multi-path interferometers on a quantum computer
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• Erasing the which-path information of photons
• Experimental demonstration of robustness of Gaussian quantum coherence