The Haroche-Ramsey experiment as a generalized measurement

Abstract

A number of atomic beam experiments, related to the Ramsey experiment and a recent experiment by Brune et al., are studied with respect to the question of complementarity. Three different procedures for obtaining information on the state of the incoming atom are compared. Positive operator-valued measures are explicitly calculated. It is demonstrated that, in principle, it is possible to choose the experimental arrangement so as to admit an interpretation as a joint non-ideal measurement yielding interference and ``which-way'' information. Comparison of the different measurements gives insight into the question of which information is provided by a (generalized) quantum mechanical measurement. For this purpose the subspaces of Hilbert-Schmidt space, spanned by the operators of the POVM, are determined for different measurement arrangements and different values of the parameters.