Abstract
We combine the eyebrow-raising quantum phenomena of erasure and counterfactuality for the first time, proposing a simple yet unusual quantum eraser: A distant Bob can decide to erase which-path information from Alice’s photon, dramatically restoring interference—without previously shared entanglement, and without Alice’s photon ever leaving her laboratory.
Highlights
Hatim SalihWe combine the eyebrow-raising quantum phenomena of erasure and counterfactuality for the first time, proposing a simple yet unusual quantum eraser: A distant Bob can decide to erase which-path information from Alice’s photon, dramatically restoring interference—without previously shared entanglement, and without Alice’s photon ever leaving her laboratory
Quantum erasure was first proposed by Scully & Druhl [1] more than three decades ago, sending shockwaves through the physics community
While early debates on double-slit interference going back to Bohr [2] and Einstein focused on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as preventing one from learning which slit a particle went through while at the same time observing interference, quantum erasure put the focus on entanglement instead, a concept brought to light by Einstein et al [3] in the EPR paper
Summary
We combine the eyebrow-raising quantum phenomena of erasure and counterfactuality for the first time, proposing a simple yet unusual quantum eraser: A distant Bob can decide to erase which-path information from Alice’s photon, dramatically restoring interference—without previously shared entanglement, and without Alice’s photon ever leaving her laboratory. And Druhl showed that it was possible to place a which-path tag on individual particles passing through a double-slit interferometer without disturbing them, throwing the uncertainty principle out of the discussion. Interference, is still lost because entanglement provides which-path information. Erasing which-path information, even long after the particles have been detected, remarkably restores interference, seemingly allowing one to alter the past [4,5,6].
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