Influence of polarization and the environment on wave-particle duality

Abstract

Wave-particle duality is certainly one of the most curious concepts of contemporary physics, which ascribes mutually exclusive behaviors to quantum systems that cannot be observed simultaneously. In the context of two-path interferometers, these two behaviors are usually described in terms of the visibility of interference fringes and the path distinguishability. Here, we use quantum information-theoretic tools to derive quantifiers of these two properties, which account for the combined influence of path probability and polarization, and demonstrate that they satisfy a complementarity relation. We further show that the derived quantities can work as probes in the study of open quantum dynamics by revealing interesting facets of environment actions, such as: decoherence, depolarization and scattering.