Abstract
Loss of coherence in one system A that results from entanglement or correlation with a reservoir M has long been an important issue in quantum mechanics. It is of special interest both because of the difficulty of incorporating the resulting coherence loss into Schrödinger’s equation describing system A and because of its relevance to understanding the measurement process in particular and the connection between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics in general [1]. We discuss experiments here in which this entanglement results from the elastic scattering of a photon from an atom initially in a state with extended spatial coherence inside an atom interferometer. The major issues addressed are the degree of loss of coherence (ie. contrast of the interference fringes), both when the outgoing photon is ignored (ie. treated as a reservoir) and when information about its final state is inferred from the final momentum of the atom. This inference is exact since momentum (and energy too) is conserved and the initial momentum of both photon and atom are well specified.
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Pritchard, D.E. et al. (1996). Photon Scattering from Atoms in an Atom Interferometer: Coherence Lost and Regained. In: Eberly, J.H., Mandel, L., Wolf, E. (eds) Coherence and Quantum Optics VII. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9742-8_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9742-8_18
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