Experimentally probing anomalous time evolution of a single photon

Abstract

Abstract In quantum mechanics, a quantum system is irreversibly collapsed by a projective measurement. Hence, delicately probing the time evolution of a quantum system holds the key to understanding curious phenomena. Here, we experimentally explore an anomalous time evolution, where, illustratively, a particle disappears from a box and emerges in a different box, with a certain moment in which it can be found in neither of them. In this experiment, we directly probe this curious time evolution of a single photon by measuring up to triple-operator sequential weak values (SWVs) using a novel probeless scheme. The naive interpretation provided by single-operator weak values (WVs) seems to imply the “disappearance” and “re-appearance” of a photon as theoretically predicted. However, double- and triple-operator SWVs, representing temporal correlations between the aforementioned values, show that spatial information about the photon does not entirely vanish in the intermediate time. These results show that local values (in space and time) alone, such as single-operator WVs, cannot fully explain all types of quantum evolution in time—higher order correlations are necessary in general, shedding new light on time evolution in quantum mechanics. The probeless measurement technique proposed here for measuring multiple-operator WVs can be straightforwardly extended to study various other cases of curious quantum evolution in time.