Simulating a quantum delayed-choice experiment in which both particle and wave behaviours are investigated simultaneously.
- Wheeler’s classic delayed choice experiment is a gedankenexperiment which has since been demonstrated experimentally.
- A single photon is sent through a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with the modification that the observer decides whether or not to place the second beam splitter.
- Thus, the choice “forces” the photon to take up either its wave (interference) or particle character after it has already interacted with the first beam splitter.
- We simulate this experiment with pyQuil. The two basis states correspond to the two paths the photon can take.
- An arbitrary beam splitter is modelled as a Hadamard gate followed by modifying the relative phase of the basis states (φ) .
- Then, a controlled Hadamard operation is performed to simulate a superposition of the beam splitter OUT |0⟩ and IN |1⟩.
- The probabilities for this superposition are parameterized by α.
- We now run this experiment on a QVM for a range of φ, α and measure the intensity (photon arrival rate) in detector D’.
