Afshar's experiment revisited: a demonstration of Bohr's complementary principle

Abstract

A recent experiment performed by Afshar et al. has been interpreted as a violation of Bohr's complementarity principle between interference visibility and which-path information a two-path interferometer. The authors have reproduced the same experiment, using true single-photon pulses emitted by a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color center in a diamond crystal and propagating in a two-path wavefront-splitting interferometer realized with a Fresnels' biprism, followed by a grating with transmitting slits of adjustable width. The experimental setup is illustrated. The results go far beyond the reported results in the previous works of Afshar et al. and the subtle flaws in their analysis are then pointed out. The measured values of the interference visibility V and the which-path information, characterized by the distinguishability parameter D, are found, with values close to the ideal-case upper bound. This result demonstrates that the experiment can be perfectly explained by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, without any violation of Bohr's complementarity principle.