Delayed-choice gedanken experiments and their realizations
Xiao-song Ma, Johannes Kofler, Anton Zeilinger

TL;DR
This paper reviews the history and experimental realizations of delayed-choice experiments, which challenge classical notions of wave-particle duality by allowing the observer to choose the nature of a quantum system at a late stage.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of delayed-choice experiments, including recent implementations like quantum erasure and entanglement swapping, highlighting their significance in understanding quantum duality.
Findings
Delayed-choice experiments challenge classical wave-particle notions.
Experimental realizations demonstrate the observer’s late choice affects quantum behavior.
Entanglement swapping links wave-particle duality to entanglement-separability duality.
Abstract
The wave-particle duality dates back to Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect through quanta of light and de Broglie's hypothesis of matter waves. Quantum mechanics uses an abstract description for the behavior of physical systems such as photons, electrons, or atoms. Whether quantum predictions for single systems in an interferometric experiment allow an intuitive understanding in terms of the particle or wave picture, depends on the specific configuration which is being used. In principle, this leaves open the possibility that quantum systems always either behave definitely as a particle or definitely as a wave in every experimental run by a priori adapting to the specific experimental situation. This is precisely what is tried to be excluded by delayed-choice experiments, in which the observer chooses to reveal the particle or wave character -- or even a continuous…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsQuantum Mechanics and Applications
