Photons are lying about where they have been, again

Gregory Reznik*, Carlotta Versmold, Jan Dziewior, Florian Huber, Shrobona Bagchi, Harald Weinfurter, Justin Dressel, Lev Vaidman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Bhati and Arvind (2022) [5] recently argued that in a specially designed experiment the timing of photon detection events demonstrates photon presence at a location at which they are not present according to the weak value approach. The alleged contradiction is resolved by a subtle interference effect resulting in anomalous sensitivity of the signal imprinted on the postselected photons for the interaction at this location, similarly to the case of a nested Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a Dove prism (Alonso and Jordan (2015) [7]). We perform an in-depth analysis of the characterization of the presence of a pre- and postselected particle at a particular location based on information imprinted on the particle itself. The theoretical results are tested by a computer simulation of the proposed experiment.

Original languageEnglish
Article number128782
JournalPhysics Letters, Section A: General, Atomic and Solid State Physics
Volume470
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 May 2023

Funding

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation1915015
Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftWE2541/7-1, EXC-2111 390814868
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation735/18
Israel Science Foundation2064/19

    Keywords

    • Dove prism
    • Mach-Zehnder interferometer
    • Past of the photon
    • Photon trajectory
    • Two-state vector formalism
    • Weak values

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