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Phys. Rev. D 19, 473–484 (1979)

Complementarity in the double-slit experiment: Quantum nonseparability and a quantitative statement of Bohr's principle

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William K. Wootters and Wojciech H. Zurek
Center for Theoretical Physics and Center for Statistical Mechanics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712

Received 10 July 1978; published in the issue dated 15 January 1979

A detailed analysis of Einstein's version of the double-slit experiment, in which one tries to observe both wave and particle properties of light, is performed. Quantum nonseparability appears in the derivation of the interference pattern, which proves to be surprisingly sharp even when the trajectories of the photons have been determined with fairly high accuracy. An information-theoretic approach to this problem leads to a quantitative formulation of Bohr's complementarity principle for the case of the double-slit experiment. A practically realizable version of this experiment, to which the above analysis applies, is proposed.

© 1979 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.19.473
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.19.473
PACS:

See Also

Comment: L. S. Bartell, Complementarity in the double-slit experiment: On simple realizable systems for observing intermediate particle-wave behavior, Phys. Rev. D 21, 1698 (1980).