Experimental Observation of Simultaneous Wave and Particle Behaviors in a Narrowband Single Photon's Wave Packe

TL;DR

This paper reports an experiment observing simultaneous wave and particle behaviors in a single photon’s wave packet, challenging traditional duality theory and suggesting new ways to encode quantum information.

Contribution

It demonstrates the first experimental observation of simultaneous wave-particle behaviors in a narrowband single photon’s wave packet, indicating a need to generalize quantum duality theory.

Findings

Simultaneous wave-particle behaviors observed in a single photon.

Wave-particle state as an additional degree of freedom.

Potential for quantum information encoding.

Abstract

Light's wave-particle duality is at the heart of quantum mechanics and can be well illustrated by Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment. The choice of inserting or removing the second classical (quantum) beam splitter in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer determines the classical (quantum) wave-particle behaviors of a photon. In this paper, we report our experiment using the classical beam splitter to observe the simultaneous wave-particle behaviors in the wave-packet of a narrowband single photon. This observation suggests that it is necessary to generalize the current quantum wave-particle duality theory. Our experiment demonstrates that the produced wave-particle state can be considered an additional degree of freedom and can be utilized in encoding quantum information.