Hanbury Brown-Twiss Effect with Wave Packets

TL;DR

This paper uses a label-free approach to analyze the quantum Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect with wave packets, revealing that entanglement has minimal impact on the interference pattern, challenging traditional interpretations.

Contribution

It introduces a label-free method to analyze the HBT effect with wave packets, providing new insights into the role of entanglement and non-local correlations.

Findings

Entanglement has little effect on HBT interference.

Wave packet analysis clarifies quantum interpretation of HBT.

Reanalysis of classic experiment suggests non-locality is not the cause of observed interference.

Abstract

The Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) effect, at the quantum level, is essentially an interference of one particle with another, as opposed to interference of a particle with itself. Conventional treatments of identical particles encounter difficulties while dealing with entanglement. A recently introduced label-free approach to indistinguishable particles is described, and is used to analyze the HBT effect. Quantum wave-packets have been used to provide a better understanding of the quantum interpretation of the HBT effect. The effect is demonstrated for two independent particles governed by Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac statistics. The HBT effect is also analyzed for pairs of entangled particles. Surprisingly, entanglement has almost no effect on the interference seen in the HBT effect. In the light of the results, an old quantum optics experiment is reanalyzed, and it is argued that the interference seen in that experiment is not a consequence of non-local correlations between the photons, as is commonly believed.