Experimental test of entangled histories
Name
Wilczek_Experimental test of entangled histories.pdf
Description
Submitted version
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418.29 KB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Cotler, Jordan
Duan, Lu-Ming
Hou, Pan-Yu
Wilczek, Frank
Xu, Da
Yin, Zhang-Qi
Zu, Chong
Date Issued
December 2017
Journal
Annals of Physics
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
© 2017 Elsevier Inc. Entangled histories arise when a system partially decoheres in such a way that its past cannot be described by a sequence of states, but rather a superposition of sequences of states. Such entangled histories have not been previously observed. We propose and demonstrate the first experimental scheme to create entangled history states of the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) type. In our experiment, the polarization states of a single photon at three different times are prepared as a GHZ entangled history state. We define a GHZ functional which attains a maximum value 1 on the ideal GHZ entangled history state and is bounded above by 1∕16 for any three-time history state lacking tripartite entanglement. We have measured the GHZ functional on a state we have prepared experimentally, yielding a value of 0.656±0.005, clearly demonstrating the contribution of entangled histories.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aop.2017.09.004
