Discriminating distinguishability

Stanisic, Stasja; Turner, Peter S.

doi:10.1103/physreva.98.043839

Cited by 24 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…The underlying mechanism is a generalisation of the famous Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect in quantum optics 34,40,41 . In this effect, polarisation may play the role of the spin.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Mixing indistinguishable systems leads to a quantum Gibbs paradox

2021

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The classical Gibbs paradox concerns the entropy change upon mixing two gases. Whether an observer assigns an entropy increase to the process depends on their ability to distinguish the gases. A resolution is that an “ignorant” observer, who cannot distinguish the gases, has no way of extracting work by mixing them. Moving the thought experiment into the quantum realm, we reveal new and surprising behaviour: the ignorant observer can extract work from mixing different gases, even if the gases cannot be directly distinguished. Moreover, in the macroscopic limit, the quantum case diverges from the classical ideal gas: as much work can be extracted as if the gases were fully distinguishable. We show that the ignorant observer assigns more microstates to the system than found by naive counting in semiclassical statistical mechanics. This demonstrates the importance of accounting for the level of knowledge of an observer, and its implications for genuinely quantum modifications to thermodynamics.

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“…The underlying mechanism is a generalisation of the famous Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect in quantum optics 34,40,41 . In this effect, polarisation may play the role of the spin.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Mixing indistinguishable systems leads to a quantum Gibbs paradox

2021

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“…Extending to more photons, similarity is related to traces of products of their density matrices and mixedness means the largest number of distinguishing parameters for N coincident photons increases to (N ! − 1) [12,23]. Constructing pure state decompositions for the mixed states involved means that interference can be expressed as an incoherent sum of pure state interferences [10].…”

Section: Distinguishable and Mixed Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distinguishability and mixedness in quantum interference

Jones¹,

Kumar²,

D'Aurelio³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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We study the impact of distinguishability and mixedness -two fundamental properties of quantum states -on quantum interference. We show that these can influence the interference of multiple particles in different ways, leading to effects that cannot be observed in the interference of two particles alone. This is demonstrated experimentally by interfering three independent photons in pure and mixed states and observing their different multiphoton interference, despite exhibiting the same two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference. Besides its fundamental relevance, our observation has important implications for quantum technologies relying on photon interference.

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“…Indeed, since the Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment [18], relating photon bunching on a beam-splitter to indistinguishability, it is known that distinguishability of identical particles scales up with scaling up the interference experiment, since it is described by the symmetric group action on a quantum multi-particle state [19], whose size scales up exponentially with the number of particles involved. Partial distinguishability in interference with identical particles, bosons or fermions, has been studied in a number of theoretical works [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] and experiments [24,[30][31][32][33][34][35]. Moreover, signatures of interspecies distinguishability are also revealed in systems of interacting bosons [36].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distinguishability in quantum interference with the squeezed states

Shchesnovich

2021

Preprint

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Distinguishability theory is developed for the quantum interference of squeezed vacuum states on a unitary linear multiport. It is found that the entanglement of the photon pairs over the internal Schmidt modes is one of the sources of partial distinguishability and that its effect is accounted for by the cycle structure of the symmetric group acting on a double-set. A measure of partial distinguishability is proposed and shown to bound the total variation distance between the probability distributions from the quantum interference with indistinguishable and partially distinguishable squeezed states. This allows to quantify partial distinguishability in the recent experimental gaussian boson sampling. In derivation of all the results the first-order quantization representation, generally underestimated, serves as an indispensable tool. The approach allows for generalizations, for instance, it can be adapted to generalized (non-gaussian) squeezed states, such as those recently generated in the three-mode parametric down-conversion.

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Discriminating distinguishability

Cited by 24 publications

References 59 publications

Mixing indistinguishable systems leads to a quantum Gibbs paradox

Mixing indistinguishable systems leads to a quantum Gibbs paradox

Distinguishability and mixedness in quantum interference

Distinguishability in quantum interference with the squeezed states

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