Photon-detector entanglement by interference at a beam splitter

TL;DR

This paper proposes a simple experimental setup to observe quantum entanglement between a photon and a detector, exploring the nature of wavefunction collapse as spontaneous symmetry breaking within quantum mechanics.

Contribution

It introduces an original experiment involving photon interference at a beam splitter to study entanglement and collapse, providing a realistic approach to foundational quantum mechanics questions.

Findings

Entanglement between photon and detector can be experimentally studied.

Collapse may be modeled as spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The proposed experiment is feasible within gas laser systems.

Abstract

In early days of navigation over sea and ocean it has been considered that when a ship, governed by waves, arrives as some critical distance of the global character, then this ship must absolute collapse, i.e. must fall in the nothing. Only remarkable Magellan voyage definitely "experimentally" realized proof that there is no absolute collapse of the ship trajectory on the ocean, that different collapses of the ship trajectories have always less or more local character, and, that only spherical-symmetric form of the Earth has absolute character. Within standard quantum mechanical formalism collapse by measurement, i.e. detection must be postulated independently of the unitary symmetric (that conserves superposition or entanglement) quantum mechanical dynamics since to this day there is no realized experiment on the existence of the entanglement between quantum system and detector (Schrodinger cat effect). In this work we suggest an original, realistic and simple, form of the experiment of interference of single photon at beam splitter. Here quantum entanglement between photon and photon trajectories detector (which corresponds to single simple two-level system, practically single atom) is studied. (All this is equivalent to elementary processes within typical gas laser tube and in this sense suggested entanglement can be considered even experimentally verified.) It admits model of the collapse by detection as the spontaneous breaking of the unitary symmetry of quantum mechanical dynamics as an especial case of the general formalism of the spontaneous symmetry breaking. Collapse represents an effective,local phenomena, while unitary symmetry represents an absolute exact, global phenomena. It can be extremely important for the quantum mechanics foundation.