Title | Interferometric visibility and coherence |
Publication Type | Journal Article |
Year of Publication | 2017 |
Authors | Biswas, T, García-Díaz, M, Winter, A |
Refereed Designation | Refereed |
Journal | Proceedings of the Royal Society A London |
Volume | 473 |
Issue | 2203 |
Pagination | 20170170 |
Date Published | 10/2017 |
ISSN | 1364-5021 |
Abstract | Recently, the basic concept of quantum coherence (or superposition) has gained a lot of renewed attention, after Baumgratz et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401. (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.140401)), following Aberg (https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0612146), have proposed a resource theoretic approach to quantify it. This has resulted in a large number of papers and preprints exploring various coherence monotones, and debating possible forms for the resource theory. Here, we take the view that the operational foundation of coherence in a state, be it quantum or otherwise wave mechanical, lies in the observation of interference effects. Our approach here is to consider an idealized multi-path interferometer, with a suitable detector, in such a way that the visibility of the interference pattern provides a quantitative expression of the amount of coherence in a given probe state. We present a general framework of deriving coherence measures from visibility, and demonstrate it by analysing several concrete visibility parameters, recovering some known coherence measures and obtaining some new ones. |
DOI | 10.1098/rspa.2017.0170 |
