Bridging Coherence Optics and Classical Mechanics -- A Universal Light Polarization-Entanglement Complementary Relation

Abstract

While optics and mechanics are two distinct branches of physics, they are connected. It is well known that geometrical/ray treatment of light has direct analogies to mechanical descriptions of particle motion. However, connections between coherence wave optics and classical mechanics are rarely reported. Here we explore links of the two for an arbitrary light field by performing a quantitative analysis of two optical coherence properties: polarization and entanglement (implied by a wave picture of light due to Huygens and Fresnel). A universal complementary identity relation is obtained. More surprisingly, optical polarization, entanglement, and their identity relation are shown to be quantitatively associated with mechanical concepts of center of mass and moment of inertia through the Huygens-Steiner theorem for rigid body rotation. The obtained result bridges coherence wave optics and classical mechanics through the two theories of Huygens.

arXiv comment6 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (21)

• Entanglement of Formation of an Arbitrary State of Two Qubits
• Classical entanglement in polarization metrology
• Bell-like inequality for spin-orbit separability of a classical laser beam
• Entanglement Polytopes: Multiparticle Entanglement from Single-Particle Information
• Shifting the Quantum-Classical Boundary: Theory and Experiment for Statistically Classical Optical Fields
• Bohr's Complementarity: Completed with Entanglement
• Coherence Constraints and the Last Hidden Optical Coherence
• Geometric descriptions for the polarization for nonparaxial optical fields: a tutorial
• Polarization Coherence Theorem
• Predictability, Distinguishability and Entanglement
• Critical sets of the total variance of state detect all SLOCC entanglement classes
• Measures of Quantum State Purity and Classical Degree of Polarization
• Entanglement Polygon Inequality in Qubit Systems
• Emerging Connections: Quantum and Classical Optics
• Nonlocal continuous variable correlations and violation of Bell's inequality for light beams with topological singularities
• Violation of Bell's inequality for phase singular beams
• Entanglement polygon inequality in qudit systems
• Asymptotic properties of entanglement polytopes for large number of qubits
• Center-of-mass interpretation for bipartite purity analysis of $N$-party entanglement
• Classical and quantum complementarity
• Multipath Wave-Particle Duality in Classical Optics

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Photonic Energy-Coherence Theorem and Experimental Validations
• Zero-Point Energy Density at the Origin of the Vacuum Permittivity and Photon Propagation Time Fluctuation