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Ninety years ago in 1927, at an international congress in Como, Italy, Niels Bohr gave an address which is recognized as the first instance in which the term complementarity, as a physical concept, was spoken publicly [1], revealing Bohrs own thinking about Louis de Broglies duality. Bohr had very slowly accepted duality as a principle of physics: close observation of any quantum object will reveal either wave-like or particle-like behavior, one or the other of two fundamental and complementary features. Little disagreement exists today about complementaritys importance and broad applicability in quantum science. Book-length scholarly examinations even provide speculations about the relevance of complementarity in fields as different from physics as biology, psychology and social anthropology, connections which were apparently of interest to Bohr himself (see Jammer [2], Murdoch [3] and Whitaker [4]). Confusion evident in Como following his talk was not eliminated by Bohrs article [1], and complementarity has been subjected to nine decades of repeated examination ever since with no agreed resolution. Semi-popular treatments [5] as well as expert examinations [6-9] show that the topic cannot be avoided, and complementarity retains its central place in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. However, recent approaches by our group [10-13] and others [14-20] to the underlying notion of coherence now allow us to present a universal formulation of complementarity that may signal the end to the confusion. We demonstrate a new relationship that constrains the behavior of an electromagnetic field (quantum or classical) in the fundamental context of two-slit experiments. We show that entanglement is the ingredient needed to complete Bohrs formulation of complementarity, debated for decades because of its incompleteness.
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We present a unified view of the Berry phase of a quantum system and its entanglement with surroundings. The former reflects the nonseparability between a system and a classical environment as the latter for a quantum environment, and the concept of geometric time-energy uncertainty can be adopted as a signature of the nonseparability. Based on this viewpoint, we study their relationship in the quantum-classical transition of the environment, with the aid of a spin-half particle (qubit) model exposed to a quantum-classical hybrid field. In the quantum-classical transition, the Berry phase has a similar connection with the time-energy uncertainty as the case with only a classical field, whereas the geometric phase for the mixed state of the qubit exhibits a complementary relationship with the entanglement. Namely, for a fixed time-energy uncertainty, the entanglement is gradually replaced by the mixed geometric phase as the quantum field vanishes. And the mixed geometric phase becomes the Berry phase in the classical limit. The same results can be draw out from a displaced harmonic oscillator model.
By rigorously formalizing the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) argument, and Bohrs reply, one can appreciate that both arguments were technically correct. Their opposed conclusions about the completeness of quantum mechanics hinged upon an explicit difference in their criteria for when a measurement on Alices system can be regarded as not disturbing Bobs system. The EPR criteria allow their conclusion (incompletness) to be reached by establishing the physical reality of just a single observable $q$ (not a conjugate pair $q$ and $p$), but I show that Bohrs definition of disturbance prevents the EPR chain of reasoning from establishing even this. Moreover, I show that Bohrs definition is intimately related to the asymmetric concept of quantum discord from quantum information theory: if and only if the joint state has no Alice-discord, she can measure any observable without disturbing (in Bohrs sense) Bobs system. Discord can be present even when systems are unentangled, and this has implications for our understanding of the historical development of notions of quantum nonlocality.
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which first took shape in Bohrs landmark 1928 paper on complementarity, remains an enigma. Although many physicists are skeptical about the necessity of Bohrs philosophical conclusions, his pragmatic message about the importance of the whole experimental arrangement is widely accepted. It is, however, generally also agreed that the Copenhagen interpretation has no direct consequences for the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. Here I show that the application of Bohrs main concepts of complementarity to the subsystems of a closed system requires a change in the definition of the quantum state. The appropriate definition is as an equivalence class similar to that used by von Neumann to describe macroscopic subsystems. He showed that such equivalence classes are necessary in order to maximize information entropy and achieve agreement with experimental entropy. However, the significance of these results for the quantum theory of measurement has been overlooked. Current formulations of measurement theory are therefore manifestly in conflict with experiment. This conflict is resolved by the definition of the quantum state proposed here.
The ontological aspect of Bohmian mechanics, as a hidden-variable theory that provides us with an objective description of a quantum world without observers, is widely known. Yet its practicality is getting more and more acceptance and relevance, for it has proven to be an efficient and useful resource to tackle, explore, describe and explain such phenomena. This practical aspect emerges precisely when the pragmatic application of the formalism prevails over any other interpretational question, still a matter of debate and controversy. In this regard, the purpose here is to show and discuss how Bohmian mechanics emphasizes in a natural manner a series of dynamical features difficult to find out through other quantum approaches. This arises from the fact that Bohmian mechanics allows us to establish a direct link between the dynamics exhibited by quantum systems and the local variations of the quantum phase associated with their state. To illustrate these facts, simple models of two physically insightful quantum phenomena have been chosen, namely, the dispersion of a free Gaussian wave packet and Young-type two-slit interference. As it is shown, the outcomes from their analysis render a novel, alternative understanding of the dynamics displayed by these quantum phenomena in terms of the underlying local velocity field that connects the probability density with the quantum flux. This field, nothing but the so-called guidance condition in standard Bohmian mechanics, thus acquires a prominent role to understand quantum dynamics, as the mechanism responsible for such dynamics. This goes beyond the passive role typically assigned to this field in Bohmian mechanics, where traditionally trajectories and quantum potentials have received more attention instead.
A 2015 experiment by Hanson and Delft colleagues provided further confirmation that the quantum world violates the Bell inequalities, being the first Bell test to close two known experimental loopholes simultaneously. The experiment was also taken to provide new evidence of spooky action at a distance. Here we argue for caution about the latter claim. The Delft experiment relies on entanglement swapping, and our main claim is that this geometry introduces an additional loophole in the argument from violation of the Bell inequalities to action at a distance: the apparent action at a distance may be an artifact of collider bias. In the absence of retrocausality, the sensitivity of such experiments to this Collider Loophole (CL) depends on the temporal relation between the entanglement swapping measurement C and the two measurements A and B between which we seek to infer a causal connection. CL looms large if the C is in the future of A and B, but not if C is in the past. The Delft experiment itself is the intermediate case, in which the separation is spacelike. We argue that this leaves it vulnerable to CL, unable to establish conclusively that it avoids it. An Appendix discusses the implications of permitting retrocausality for the issue of causal influence across entanglement swapping measurements.
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