Abstract
Quantum coherence stemming from the superposition behaviour of a particle beyond the classical realm, serves as one of the most fundamental features in quantum mechanics. The wave-particle duality phenomenon, which shares the same origin, has a strong relationship with quantum coherence. Recently, an elegant relation between quantum coherence and path information has been theoretically derived. Here, we experimentally test such new duality by l1-norm measure and the minimum-error state discrimination. We prepare three classes of two-photon states encoded in polarisation degree of freedom, with one photon serving as the target and the other photon as the detector. We observe that wave-particle-like complementarity and Bagan’s equality, defined by the duality relation between coherence and path information, is well satisfied. Our results may shed new light on the original nature of wave-particle duality and on the applications of quantum coherence as a fundamental resource in quantum technologies.
Highlights
Quantum coherence stemming from the superposition behaviour of a particle beyond the classical realm, serves as one of the most fundamental features in quantum mechanics
Together with the energy quantisation, a quantum version of coherence has become one of the most fundamental features that can mark the departure of quantum mechanics from the classical realm[1,2,3,4,5]
The development of quantum technologies demands a reassessment of fundamental resources such as quantum coherence, including relations with other quantum physical phenomena and rigorous quantitative description[10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]
Summary
Quantum coherence stemming from the superposition behaviour of a particle beyond the classical realm, serves as one of the most fundamental features in quantum mechanics. The development of quantum technologies demands a reassessment of fundamental resources such as quantum coherence, including relations with other quantum physical phenomena and rigorous quantitative description[10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17] Among these quantum physical phenomena, wave-particle duality has been a unified picture to fully describe the behaviour of quantum-scale objects. Bagan et al.[18] proposed another elegant relation to characterise the new wave-particle-like duality based on the coherence Cl1 which quantifies the wave nature of a state and the path information which is given by the minimum-error state discrimination between the detector state and the target state. The Bagan’s equality defined by the duality relation between coherence and path information can be well satisfied
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