Freiburg 2019 – scientific programme
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FM: Fall Meeting
FM 12: Quantum Sensing: Hardware Platforms
FM 12.6: Talk
Monday, September 23, 2019, 15:30–15:45, 2006
Testing Foundations of Quantum Mechanics with a Waveguide Interferometer — •Sebastian Gstir1, Robert Keil1, Thomas Kauten1, Toni Eichelkraut2, Alexander Szameit3, and Gregor Weihs1 — 1Institut für Experimentalphysik, Universität Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria — 2Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany — 3Institut für Physik, Universität Rostock, Germany
In this work we designed and built an integrated three-path waveguide interferometer in fused silica [1] for measuring so-called higher-order interferences [2] and higher-dimensional phases [3]. These hypothetical higher-order interferences and higher-dimensional phases do not occur in ordinary quantum mechanics or classical electrodynamics and thus the experiment tests the foundations of these theories. In our interferometer miniature mechanical shutters switch the individual arms on and off. Our main goal was to avoid cross-talk between the shutter state in a path and the transmissivity or phase in any other path. Using a laser source we were able to bound the occurrence of any higher-order interferences to be less than 8(12)· 10−5, normalized to the expected two-path interference and the occurrence of any higher-dimensional phases to be less than 2%.
[1] T. Meany et al., Laser Phot. Rev. 9, 363 (2015).
[2] R. D. Sorkin, Mod. Phys. Lett. A 09, 3119 (1994).
[3] A. Peres, Phys. Rev. Lett. 42, 683 (1979).