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Research Paper Co-Authored by Professors Hillery and Bergou to be Published in Physical Review Letters

A research paper, 'Relations between coherence and path information,' which was co-authored by Emilio Bagan, Janos A. Bergou (of the Hunter Physic Department), Seth S. Cottrell, and Mark Hillery (also of the Physics Department), has just been accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters, the world's premier physics letter journal. A short description of the paper, provided by Professor Hillery, follows:

"A quantum mechanical particle going from one point to another samples all of the possible paths between the two points.  If we know which path the particle took, quantum effects are lost.  If we have no information about the path taken, quantum effects are at their maximum.  One would like something that fills the gap between these two extremes, a quantitative statement about how a certain amount of path information limits quantum effects.  In our paper, we derived two such statements using recently defined measures of quantum coherence.  Both of these statements are kinds of uncertainty relations, i.e.  more of one thing implies less of another, and both place constraints on the behavior of quantum systems.  The results can also be viewed as a quantitative statement of wave-particle duality, the quantum effects being characteristic of wave-type behavior and the path information being characteristic of particle-type behavior."

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