Hanbury Brown and Twiss: Important, anti-weird, beautiful

I read with interest Daniel Kleppner’s lucid column on Hanbury Brown’s “steamroller.” Kleppner mentions an aspect of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect that at first seemingly defied a quantum interpretation; he terms it “anti-weird,” since in certain cases a completely classical understanding is possible. Other aspects of the Hanbury Brown physics are truly weird in the sense that they violate a Bell inequality.

I and collaborators Peter Samuelsson and Eugene Sukhorukov have proposed an interferometry experiment with fermions in an electrical conductor. Carriers are injected into the conductor from two contacts, and the cross correlation of the electrical current is measured at two other contacts along the conductor. ¹ In that arrangement, it is possible to investigate the Aharonov–Bohm effect in the fermionic HBT interferometer. Our initial discussions of such an effect date back to the early 1990s. ² My collaborators and I found a geometry in which the conductance (intensity) shows no Aharonov–Bohm signature, but the current correlation (intensity correlation) is nevertheless a periodic function of the Aharonov–Bohm flux. ¹

We termed our finding the two-particle Aharonov–Bohm effect. The effect was recently observed by a group headed by Moty Heiblum at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His team cooled a mesoscopic conductor to tens of millikelvin and measured its conductance and noise correlations. ³ Theoretical work by Carlo Beenakker at Leiden University has shown that due to orbital quasiparticle entanglement, ⁴ the two-particle effect is equivalent at zero temperature to a violation of a Bell inequality. ¹ The case of nonzero temperature is more complicated and is still a subject of research. ⁵ The possibility of observing truly weird quantum physics is certain to increase interest in Hanbury Brown’s physics.