Investigation into interference phenomena at extremely low light intensities by means of a large Michelson interferometer

Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, an Empiricist Approach

“…It is questionable, however, whether Bohr in this historical account of his discussion with Einstein on the foundations of quantum mechanics has observed the necessary finesse in presenting his ideas on particle-wave duality. It should be noted here that the gradual development of the interference pattern, as apparent in figure 4.4, has not been observed experimentally until 1958 (for light [244]), or 1959 (for electrons [230]). Before that time the idea of particle-wave duality as an illustration of complementarity was a very attractive one, and undoubtedly has inspired Bohr's thinking about complementarity, even though at a certain moment he saw that the idea could not be maintained in its original form.…”

Single-photon generation and simultaneous observation of wave and particle properties

“…For a stationary light field, the correlations between the photon detection events vanish after a sufficiently large time delay and the coincidences become completely random. Therefore in the stationary case g (2) (τ) → 1 for τ → ∞. If g (2) (τ) = 1 for all values of τ, the field exhibits a Poissonian photon statistics, where the variance of the photon number is equal to its mean value when counted over intervals of arbitrary length.…”

“…Therefore in the stationary case g (2) (τ) → 1 for τ → ∞. If g (2) (τ) = 1 for all values of τ, the field exhibits a Poissonian photon statistics, where the variance of the photon number is equal to its mean value when counted over intervals of arbitrary length. It can be shown that for any classical light field g (2) (τ) ≥ 1 and g (2) (0) ≥ g (2) (τ) [6].…”

“…We find from Eq. (3) that g (2) (0) = 1 − 1/n for a photon-number state |n , containing exactly n photons. It is obvious that g (2) (0) = 0 for a single-photon state |n = 1 , because here, it is impossible to detect two photons at the same time.…”

“…(3) that g (2) (0) = 1 − 1/n for a photon-number state |n , containing exactly n photons. It is obvious that g (2) (0) = 0 for a single-photon state |n = 1 , because here, it is impossible to detect two photons at the same time. When g (2) (0) is observed to be smaller than 0.5, this is an evidence for singlephoton emission.…”