Interferência quântica com estado híbrido emaranhado no interferômetro de Mach-Zehnder: análise do número médio de fótons.

Abstract

The Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is an optical apparatus used, e.g., in engineering and also to test the fundamentals of quantum theory. In this work, we investigate different quantum states of the electromagnetic field as input to the MZI, all under the theoretical perspective (analytical). As input, we use a hybrid entangled state (our main focus) which becomes separable in the limit α → 0. We obtain the dependence of the average number of photons with phase shift, among other parameters. Explicitly, we ob- serve an interesting dependence on |α|2 as well as the imaginary part of α. We discuss these results and compare with the literature. In addition, this work also includes using Thermo Field Dynamics (TFD), the thermalization of the state | α⟩| 0⟩, aiming the usage in the MZI in future works.