Can Two-Photon Interference be Considered the Interference of Two Photons?

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

1996-09-02

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

T. B. Pittman, D. V. Strekalov, A. Migdall, M. H. Rubin, A. V. Sergienko, and Y. H. Shih, Can Two-Photon Interference be Considered the Interference of Two Photons?,Phys. Rev. Lett. 77(10), 1917, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.77.1917

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Public Domain Mark 1.0
This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.

Subjects

Abstract

We report on a “postponed compensation” experiment in which the observed two-photon entangled state interference cannot be pictured in terms of the overlap of the two individual photon wave packets of a parametric down-conversion pair on a beam splitter. In the sense of a quantum eraser, the distinguishability of the different two-photon Feynman amplitudes leading to a coincidence detection is removed by delaying the compensation until after the output of an unbalanced two-photon interferometer.