Leggett-Garg tests for macrorealism: interference experiments and the simple harmonic oscillator

TL;DR

This paper investigates Leggett-Garg tests for macrorealism using interference experiments and harmonic oscillators, revealing conditions for violations and classicality, and comparing with recent experimental results.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of LG violations in interference setups and harmonic oscillators, highlighting new relationships with NSIT conditions and extending previous findings.

Findings

LG violations always accompany destructive interference

There are regimes with destructive interference where LG inequalities hold

Analytical example of LG violation in a harmonic oscillator with Gaussian initial state

Abstract

Leggett-Garg (LG) tests for macrorealism were originally designed to explore quantum coherence on the macroscopic scale. Interference experiments and systems modelled by harmonic oscillators provide useful examples of situations in which macroscopicity has been approached experimentally and are readily turned into LG tests for a single dichotomic variable Q. Applying this approach to the double-slit experiment in which a non-invasive measurement at the slits is included, we exhibit LG violations. We find that these violations are always accompanied by destructive interference. The converse is not true in general and we find that there are non-trivial regimes in which there is destructive interference but the two-time LG inequalities are satisfied which implies that it is in fact often possible to assign (indirectly determined) probabilities for the interferometer paths. Similar features have been observed in recent work involving a LG analysis of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and we compare with those results. We extend the analysis to the triple-slit experiment again finding LG violations, and we also exhibit examples of some surprising relationships between LG inequalities and NSIT conditions that do not exist for dichotomic variables. For the simple harmonic oscillator, we find an analytically tractable example showing a two-time LG violation with a gaussian initial state, echoing in simpler form recent results of Bose et al (Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 210402 (2018)).