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Gerald Badurek

Publications and source records attributed to Gerald Badurek.

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Violation of Heisenberg's error-disturbance uncertainty relation in neutron spin measurements

In its original formulation, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle dealt with the relationship between the error of a quantum measurement and the thereby induced disturbance on the measured object. Meanwhile, Heisenberg's heuristic arguments have turned out to be correct only for special cases. A new universally valid relation was derived by Ozawa in 2003. Here, we demonstrate that Ozawa's predictions hold for projective neutron-spin measurements. The experimental inaccessibility of error and disturbance claimed elsewhere has been overcome using a tomographic method. By a systematic variation of experimental parameters in the entire configuration space, the physical behavior of error and disturbance for projective spin-1/2 measurements is illustrated comprehensively. The violation of Heisenberg's original relation, as well as, the validity of Ozawa's relation become manifest. In addition, our results conclude that the widespread assumption of a reciprocal relation between error and disturbance is not valid in general.

quant-ph

Experimental demonstration of a universally valid error-disturbance uncertainty relation in spin-measurements

The uncertainty principle generally prohibits determination of certain pairs of quantum mechanical observables with arbitrary precision and forms the basis of indeterminacy in quantum mechanics. It was Heisenberg who used the famous gamma-ray microscope thought experiment to illustrate this indeterminacy. A lower bound was set for the product of the measurement error of an observable and the disturbance caused by the measurement. Later on, the uncertainty relation was reformulated in terms of standard deviations, which focuses solely on indeterminacy of predictions and neglects unavoidable recoil in measuring devices. A correct formulation of the error-disturbance relation, taking recoil into account, is essential for a deeper understanding of the uncertainty principle. However, the validity of Heisenberg's original error-disturbance uncertainty relation is justifed only under limited circumstances. Another error-disturbance relation, derived by rigorous and general theoretical treatments of quantum measurements, is supposed to be universally valid. Here, we report a neutron optical experiment that records the error of a spin-component measurement as well as the disturbance caused on another spin-component measurement. The results confirm that both error and disturbance completely obey the new, more general relation but violate the old one in a wide range of an experimental parameter.

quant-ph

Engineering of triply entangled states in a single-neutron system

We implemented a triply entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger(GHZ)-like state and coherently manipulated the spin, path, and energy degrees of freedom in a single neutron system. The GHZ-like state was analyzed with an inequality derived by Mermin: we determined the four expectation values and finally obtained M = 2.558 +/- 0.004 > 2, which exhibits a clear violation of the noncontextual assumption and confirms quantum contextuality.

quant-ph

Violation of a Bell-like Inequality in Neutron Optical Experiments: Quantum contextuality

We report a single-neutron optical experiment to demonstrate the violation of a Bell-like inequality. Entanglement is achieved not between particles, but between the degrees of freedom, in this case, for a single-particle. The spin-{\small 1/2} property of neutrons are utilized. The total wave function of the neutron is described in a tensor product Hilbert space. A Bell-like inequality is derived not by a non-locality but by a contextuality. Joint measurements of the spinor and the path properties lead to the violation of a Bell-like inequality. Manipulation of the wavefunction in one Hilbert space influences the result of the measurement in the other Hilbert space. A discussion is given on the quantum contextuality and an entanglement-induced correlation in our experiment.

quant-ph