Atomic Hong–Ou–Mandel experiment

Abstract

Quantum mechanics is a very successful and still intriguing theory, introducing two major counter-intuitive concepts. Wave-particle duality means that objects normally described as particles, such as electrons, can also behave as waves, while entities primarily described as waves, such as light, can also behave as particles.This revolutionary idea nevertheless relies on notions borrowed from classical physics, either waves or particles evolving in our ordinary space-time. By contrast, entanglement leads to interferences between the amplitudes of multi-particle states, which happen in an abstract mathematical space and have no classical counterpart. This fundamental feature has been strikingly demonstrated by the violation of Bell's inequalities [1][2][3][4] . There is, however, a conceptually simpler situation in which the interference between two-particle amplitudes entails a behaviour impossible to describe by any classical model. It was realised in the Hong, Ou and Mandel (HOM) experiment 5 , in which two photons arriving simultaneously in the input channels of a beam-splitter always emerge together in one of the output channels. In this letter, we report on the realisation, with atoms, of a HOM experiment closely following the original protocol. This opens the prospect of testing Bell's inequalities involving mechanical observables of massive particles, such as momentum, using methods inspired by quantum optics 6,7 , with an eye on theories of the quantum-to-classical transition [8][9][10][11] . Our work also demonstrates a new way to produce and benchmark twin-atom pairs 12,13 that may be of interest for quantum information processing 14 and quantum simulation 15 . 1 arXiv:1501.03065v2 [quant-ph] 15 Jan 2015A pair of entangled particles is described by a state vector that cannot be factored as a product of two state vectors associated with each particle. Although entanglement does not require that the two particles be identical 2 , it arises naturally in systems of indistinguishable particles due to the symmetrisation of the state. A remarkable illustration is the HOM experiment, in which two photons enter in the two input channels of a beam-splitter and one measures the correlation between the signals produced by photon counters placed at the two output channels. A joint detection at these detectors arises from two possible processes: either both photons are transmitted by the beam-splitter or both are reflected (Fig. 1c). If the two photons are indistinguishable, both processes lead to the same final quantum state and the probability of joint detection results from the addition of their amplitudes. Because of elementary properties of the beam-splitter, these amplitudes have same modulus but opposite signs, thus their sum vanishes and so also the probability of joint detection (Refs. [16,17] and Methods). In fact, to be fully indistinguishable, not only must the photons have the same energy and polarisation, but their final spatio-temporal modes must be identical. In the HOM experiment, it means that the ...

RETRACTED: What Is Wrong with Bohm’s Mechanics? An Analysis of a Hong-Ou-Mandel Type Experiment

“…Under such conditions, if a collision of two atoms occurred, and was also accompanied by interaction with the lattice, the z-linear momenta of the atoms is changed to new values, P and p, Pp  , see figure 1, a in [20] or [19] and represents schematically the elements used in producing and detecting atom pairs. On a BEC (white vertical oval) located in an optical trap (pink shaded) is superimposed a moving optical lattice (blue).…”

“…For this reason, another experiment is analyzed here, recently performed at the Charles Fabry labs [19]. The experiment is a realization of the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) experiment, with bosons possessing rest-mass, 4 He atoms, instead of photons.…”

Ultracold metastable helium: Ramsey fringes and atom interferometry

“…It is not trivial to populate only the m = 0 state. Two Raman laser pulses slightly detuned from the 2 3 S 1 -2 3 P 0 transition [20] can be used and close to 100% transfer efficiency can be obtained at the cost of a separate laser system. A simpler and robust method is to apply an rf pulse as discussed in the next subsection.…”

“…Transversal Bragg scattering experiments in a wellcollimated beam of He* atoms were performed around the turn of the century in Eindhoven [17]. Recent experiments include measurement of the Hanbury Brown Twiss effect for bosons [18] and fermions [19], the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect for matter waves [20] and realization of Wheelers delayed choice experiment for single massive particles [21].…”

Performing Hong-Ou-Mandel-type numerical experiments with repulsive condensates: The case of dark and dark-bright solitons

“…In its most recent implementations, a variant of the HOM experiment involving atoms rather than photons was realized in Ref. [14] and another one in the frequency domain involving photons of different colors was achieved in Ref. [15].…”