Yutaka Mizobuchi
Yutaka Mizobuchi | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Hamakita, Japan |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Known for | The two-prism test of the complementarity principle (with Yoshiyuki Ohtake) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | experimental quantum optics |
Yutaka Mizobuchi is a Japanese experimental physicist, known for a single much-cited experiment in the foundations of quantum mechanics: the two-prism test of Bohr's complementarity principle carried out with Yoshiyuki Ohtake and published in 1992.
Working with single-photon states, Mizobuchi and Ohtake used a pair of glass prisms separated by a sub-wavelength air gap to look for wave-like behaviour (a photon tunnelling across the gap by frustrated total internal reflection) and particle-like behaviour (indivisible single detections) in the same apparatus. They reported seeing both, and read the result as a challenge to the mutual exclusivity that complementarity is usually taken to require. The experiment realised a proposal by Partha Ghose, Dipankar Home and G. S. Agarwal, and it prompted a substantial literature — including a statistical critique by Unnikrishnan and Murthy (1996) and a "conclusive" re-run by Brida and colleagues in 2004 — which on balance concluded that complementarity had not in fact been violated. The full account is on the paper's page, A Test of the Complementarity Principle in Single-Photon States of Light.
Little is publicly recorded about Mizobuchi beyond this work. His stated location, Hamakita — a town since absorbed into Hamamatsu, in Shizuoka — is the site of the Central Research Laboratory of Hamamatsu Photonics, the world's leading manufacturer of photomultipliers and single-photon detectors, and the kind of laboratory in which such an experiment would naturally be done; whether he was affiliated with it is a reasonable inference rather than a documented fact.
Papers on this wiki
- 1994 – A Test of the Complementarity Principle in Single-Photon States of Light, with Yoshiyuki Ohtake.