Afshar experiment

The Afshar experiment is an optics experiment, devised and carried out by Shahriar Afshar at Harvard University in 2004, which is a variation of the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics. The experiment gives information about which of two paths a photon takes through the apparatus while simultaneously allowing interference between the two paths to be observed, by showing that a grid of wires, placed at the nodes of the interference pattern, does not alter the beams. Afshar claimed that the experiment violates the principle of complementarity of quantum mechanics, which states roughly that the particle and wave aspects of quantum objects cannot be observed at the same time, and specifically the Englert–Greenberger duality relation. The experiment has been repeated by a number of investigators and its results have been confirmed, but its interpretation is controversial, and some disagree that it violates complementarity, while also disagreeing amongst themselves as to why.

Afshar's experiment uses a variant of Thomas Young's classic double-slit experiment to create interference patterns to investigate complementarity. Such interferometer experiments typically have two "arms" or paths a photon may take. One of Afshar's assertions is that, in his experiment, it is possible to check for interference fringes of a photon stream (a measurement of the wave nature of the photons) while at the same time observing each photon's path (a measurement of the particle nature of the photons).

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