The Mach-Zehnder Interferometer and the Quantum Delayed Choice

The proposal of the present work is to analyze the Delayed Choice experiment through an idealized experiment using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer combined with a quantum auxiliary particle as the result controller: interference pattern or corpuscular behavior. Initially, we studied the original proposal of the delayed choice experiment and also how the apparatus fits as an analogous model for a double-slit experiment. Within this context, we also analyze the concepts of particle and wave and their relationship to Bohr’s principle of complementarity. We show how the extension to a delayed quantum choice experiment can be done in the context of Mach-Zehnder interferometers. The general conclusions are that the wave and corpuscular behavior must be associated with the resulting probability distributions and that they emerge in the context of the quantum delayed choice experiment through a correlation between the results of the main particle and the auxiliary particle.

Keywords
Mach-Zehnder interferometer; wave-particle duality; complementarity principle; quantum delayed choice