Decades of experiments have verified the quirky（古怪的） laws of quantum theory again and again. So when scientists in Germany announced in 2012 an apparent violation¹ of a fundamental law of quantum mechanics, a physicist² at the University of Rochester was determined³ to find an explanation. "You don't destroy the laws of quantum mechanics that easily," said Robert Boyd, professor of optics and of physics at Rochester and the Canada Excellence⁴ Research Chair in Quantum Nonlinear Optics at the University of Ottawa.

 

In their 2012 version of the famous Young two-split experiment, Ralf Menzel and his colleagues at the University of Potsdam simultaneously⁵ determined a photon's path and observed high contrast interference fringes created by the interaction of waves from the two slits⁷.

 

"This result was extremely surprising, as one of the basic tenets of quantum mechanics holds that there should be no quantum interference when it is known through which slit⁶ the particle (a photon in this case) had passed," said Boyd.

 

Inspired by these intriguing⁸（有趣的） results, Boyd and his colleagues replicated⁹ the Menzel experiment. Their findings were recently published online in an early edition of the Proceedings¹⁰ of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

"The data of the Menzel experiment were very clean, so we weren't surprised to obtain the same initial result," said Boyd. "My coworkers and I asked what could explain this apparent violation of a key principle of quantum mechanics. What we found is that the resolution of the problem requires great subtly in the way that one needs to analyze¹¹ the data for this type of measurement."

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