Challenges to Bohr’s Wave-Particle Complementarity Principle

Abstract

Contrary to Bohr’s complementarity principle, in 1995 Rabinowitz proposed that by using entangled particles from the source it would be possible to determine which slit a particle goes through while still preserving the interference pattern in the Young’s two slit experiment. In 2000, Kim et al. used spontaneous parametric down conversion to prepare entangled photons as their source, and almost achieved this. In 2012, Menzel et al. experimentally succeeded in doing this. When the source emits entangled particle pairs, the traversed slit is inferred from measurement of the entangled particle’s location by using triangulation. The violation of complementarity breaches the prevailing probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, and benefits Bohm’s pilot-wave theory.