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Yoshiyuki Ohtake

From Natural Philosophy Wiki
Yoshiyuki Ohtake
ResidenceHamakita, Japan
NationalityJapanese
Known forThe two-prism test of the complementarity principle (with Yutaka Mizobuchi)
Scientific career
Fieldsexperimental quantum optics

Yoshiyuki Ohtake is a Japanese experimental physicist, known with Yutaka Mizobuchi for the 1992 two-prism test of Bohr's complementarity principle. (His surname is sometimes rendered "Ohtaké" with an accent in typeset citations, and was misspelled "Othake" on this wiki; "Ohtake" is the standard form.)

Using single-photon states and two glass prisms across a sub-wavelength gap, Ohtake and Mizobuchi sought — and reported — both wave-like tunnelling and particle-like single detection in the same apparatus, an apparent challenge to the complementarity principle. The experiment realised the Ghose–Home–Agarwal proposal and drew a decade of debate; the original claim was subsequently judged not to have been established, a story told in full on the paper's page, A Test of the Complementarity Principle in Single-Photon States of Light.

As with his co-author, little is publicly recorded about Ohtake beyond this experiment. Their shared location of Hamakita, near Hamamatsu in Shizuoka, is where Hamamatsu Photonics — the leading maker of single-photon detectors — has its Central Research Laboratory; an affiliation there is a plausible inference but not a documented one.

Papers on this wiki

See also