Experimental Demonstration of the Unified Framework for the Mixed State Geometric Phase

Abstract

Geometrical phases have been applied in virtually every major branch of physics and they play an important role in topology and knot theory in mathematics and quantum computation. However, most of the early works focus on pure quantum states which are very unrealistic and almost never occur in practice. The two existed definitions -Uhlmann's and Sj\"{o}qvist's- would result in different values for the geometric phase in general. The definition of geometric phase in mixed state scenario is still an open question. Here we present a unified framework for both approaches within one and the same formalism based on simple interferometry. We then present experimental results which confirm both approaches to mixed state geometric phase and clearly demonstrate that their unification is possible. Our experiments are furthermore the first such to measure Uhlmann's mixed state geometric phase and show in addition that it is different to the Sj\"{o}qvist's phase.