Experimental entanglement-assisted quantum delayed-choice experiment

TL;DR

This paper reports an experimental demonstration of an entanglement-assisted quantum delayed-choice experiment using NMR technology, confirming quantum mechanics predictions and challenging hidden-variable models based on classical assumptions.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental realization of a quantum delayed-choice scheme that tests the incompatibility of hidden-variable models with quantum mechanics.

Findings

Interference intensities match quantum predictions

Results contradict hidden-variable models with combined assumptions

Demonstrates quantum mechanics' superiority over classical hidden-variable theories

Abstract

The puzzling properties of quantum mechanics, wave-particle duality, entanglement and superposition, were dissected experimentally at past decades. However, hidden-variable (HV) models, based on three classical assumptions of wave-particle objectivity, determinism and independence, strive to explain or even defeat them. The development of quantum technologies enabled us to test experimentally the predictions of quantum mechanics and HV theories. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of an entanglement-assisted quantum delayed-choice scheme using a liquid nuclear magnetic resonance quantum information processor. This scheme we realized is based on the recently proposed scheme [Nat. Comms. 5:4997(2014)], which gave different results for quantum mechanics and HV theories. In our experiments, the intensities and the visibilities of the interference are in consistent the theoretical prediction of quantum mechanics. The results imply that a contradiction is appearing when all three assumptions of HV models are combined, though any two of the above assumptions are compatible with it.