de Broglie wavelength reduction for a multiphoton wave packet

Abstract

An experiment is proposed that permits the observation of the reduced de Broglie wavelengths of two-and four-photon wave packets using present technology. It is suggested to use a Mach-Zehnder setup and feed both input ports with light generated by a single nondegenerate down-conversion source. The strong quantum correlations of the light in conjunction with boson enhancement at the input beam splitter allow us to detect a two-and fourfold decrease in the observed de Broglie wavelength with perfect visibility. This allows a reduction of the observed de Broglie wavelength below the wavelength of the source.

Afshar’s Experiment Does Not Show a Violation of Complementarity

“…The analysis given here also applies to some quantum-optical cases such as single photon, thermal or Glauber coherent light [34], it is therefore not to be expected that substantially different results could be found when performing Afshar's experiment with non-classical states of light.…”

Heisenberg limited Sagnac interferometry

“…(24). This probability can be easily calculated by utilizing the Schrödinger picture evolution of the state vector |11 given in Eq.…”

“…The principle of this enhancement lies in the fact that "the photonic de Broglie wavelength" [23] of an ensemble of photons with wavelength λ and number of photons n can be measured to be λ /n using a special interferometer. Further Steuernagel [24] has proposed the measurement of the reduced de Broglie wavelength of two-and four-photon wave packets.…”

Effects of photon losses on phase estimation near the Heisenberg limit using coherent light and squeezed vacuum

“…This limit can be overcome by using the multi-photon coherences of non-classical light [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. For two mode N -photon systems, the highest possible phase sensitivity is achieved by maximally path-entangled states, which are superposition states (|N ; 0 + |0; N )/ √ 2 where all photons are either in one path or in the other path of a two path interferometer [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. The phase sensitivity of these states defines the Heisenberg limit of δφ 2 = 1/N 2 .…”