Deterministic event-based simulation of quantum interference

Abstract

We propose and analyse simple deterministic algorithms that can be used to construct machines that have primitive learning capabilities. We demonstrate that locally connected networks of these machines can be used to perform blind classification on an event-by-event basis, without storing the information of the individual events. We also demonstrate that properly designed networks of these machines exhibit behavior that is usually only attributed to quantum systems. We present networks that simulate quantum interference on an event-by-event basis. In particular we show that by using simple geometry and the learning capabilities of the machines it becomes possible to simulate single-photon interference in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The interference pattern generated by the network of deterministic learning machines is in perfect agreement with the quantum theoretical result for the single-photon Mach-Zehnder interferometer. To illustrate that networks of these machines are indeed capable of simulating quantum interference we simulate, event-by-event, a setup involving two chained Mach-Zehnder interferometers. We show that also in this case the simulation results agree with quantum theory.