2004/12/31 by Stefan Filipp, Yuji Hasegawa, Rudolf Loidl +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Nuclear Physics and Applications #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.72.021602
published as Phys. Rev. A 72, 021602(R) (2005) · 4 pages, revtex4
openalex publication_date 2005/08/10 · arxiv created 2005/10/17 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We present a split-beam neutron interferometric experiment to test the non-cyclic geometric phase tied to the spatial evolution of the system: the subjacent two-dimensional Hilbert space is spanned by the two possible paths in the interferometer and the evolution of the state is controlled by phase shifters and absorbers. A related experiment was reported previously by Hasegawa et al. [Phys. Rev. A 53, 2486 (1996)] to verify the cyclic spatial geometric phase. The interpretation of this experiment, namely to ascribe a geometric phase to this particular state evolution, has met severe criticism from Wagh [Phys. Rev. A 59, 1715 (1999)]. The extension to a non-cyclic evolution manifests the correctness of the interpretation of the previous experiment by means of an explicit calculation of the non-cyclic geometric phase in terms of paths on the Bloch-sphere.