Direct observation of the particle exchange phase of photons

Abstract

Quantum theory stipulates that if two particles are identical in all physical aspects, the allowed states of the system are either symmetric or antisymmetric with respect to permutations of the particle labels. Experimentally, the symmetry of the states can be inferred indirectly from the fact that neglecting the correct exchange symmetry in the theoretical analysis leads to dramatic discrepancies with the observations. The only way to directly unveil the symmetry of the states for, say, two identical particles is through the interference of the original state and the physically permuted one, and measure the phase associated with the permutation process, the so-called particle exchange phase. Following this idea, we have measured the exchange phase of indistinguishable photons, providing direct evidence of the bosonic character of photons.

16 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Indistinguishability-enabled coherence for quantum metrology
• Revealing quantum statistics with a pair of distant atoms
• Quantum coherences of indistinguishable particles
• Testing Photons' Bose-Einstein Statistics With Compton Scattering

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference between Two Hyper-Entangled Photons Enables Observation of Symmetric and Anti-Symmetric Particle Exchange Phases
• Remote entanglement distribution in a quantum network via multinode indistinguishability of photons
• Experimental quantum phase discrimination enhanced by controllable indistinguishability-based coherence
• Anti-Hong-Ou-Mandel interference by coherent perfect absorption of entangled photons
• Direct measurement of particle statistical phase
• Arbitrary entanglement of three qubits via linear optics
• Indistinguishability-assisted two-qubit entanglement distillation
• Generating indistinguishability within identical particle systems: spatial deformations as quantum resource activators