Wave-particle duality: an information-based approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes an information-based framework for wave-particle duality, interpreting complementarity through correlations with an informer, offering a formal, operational, and causal understanding consistent with experimental results.

Contribution

It introduces a novel information-theoretic approach to wave-particle duality, linking dual behavior to system-informer correlations and providing a generalized trade-off and causal interpretation.

Findings

Provides a formal definition of wave-particle duality based on correlations.

Offers an operational interpretation of dual behavior in terms of resources.

Derives a generalized trade-off relation for wave-particle duality.

Abstract

Recently, Bohr's complementarity principle was assessed in setups involving delayed choices. These works argued in favor of a reformulation of the aforementioned principle so as to account for situations in which a quantum system would simultaneously behave as wave and particle. Here we defend a framework that, supported by well-known experimental results and consistent with the decoherence paradigm, allows us to interpret complementarity in terms of correlations between the system and an {\em informer}. Our proposal offers formal definition and operational interpretation for the dual behavior in terms of both nonlocal resources and the couple work-information. Most importantly, our results provide a generalized information-based trade-off for the wave-particle duality and a causal interpretation for delayed-choice experiments.