I was reading an article which linked to a Wikipedia article on "delayed choice quantum eraser. Delayed-choice quantum eraser - Wikipedia It contains this excerpt, and I’ve underlined the part which really caught my eye:
My first guess at what this meant was that doing this a huge number of times will produce an interference pattern. But without the double slit that would be exceedingly amazing, and I’ve never heard of it.
But in any case, it actually doesn’t say that. So my question is: What exactly does the article mean by “a way consistent with its having interfered with itself”? Of course, being Wikipedia, that sentence be poorly phrased or just plain wrong.
In the dual-slit experiment the interference patterns appear even if you send photons through the device one at a time. It is as though each photon goes through BOTH slits and interferes with itself on the far side.
You’re right, it’s probably not that obvious what it means. It means you repeat the experiment mulitple times and you put all the results together and you get an interference pattern.
So you’re saying what the article means is that the photon of the pair that does NOT go through double slits really does produce an interference pattern? Seriously?
To be clear, each photon impact with the target is a discrete point. The interference pattern comes about by looking at the spread of multiple photons after going through the slit; you get a distribution that is consistent with an interference pattern of a wave going through both slits, similar to the classic wave mechanics double slit experiment i.e. bands of greater and lesser intensity.