Many-body manifestation of interaction-free measurement: The Elitzur-Vaidman bomb

Abstract

We consider an implementation of the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb experiment in a dc- biased electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a leakage port on one of its arms playing the role of a “lousy bomb.” Many-body correlations tend to screen out manifestations of interaction-free measurement. Analyzing the correlations between the current at the interferometer's drains and at the leakage port, we identify the limit where the originally proposed single- particle effect is recovered. Specifically, we find that in the regime of sufficiently diluted injected electron beam and short measurement times, effects of quantum-mechanical wave-particle duality emerge in the cross- current correlations.