Interferometry with Two Pairs of Spin Correlated Photons

Abstract

We propose a new experiment employing two independent sources of spin correlated photon pairs. Two photons from different unpolarized sources each pass through a polarizer to a detector. Although their trajectories never mix or cross they exhibit 4th-order-interference-like correlations when the other two photons interfere on a beam splitter even when the latter two do not pass any polarizers at all. A wave packet calculation shows that the experiment permits a very discriminatory test of hidden variable theories.