Quantifying the quantum - Urbasi Sinha

Quantum mechanics is a cornerstone of modern physics. Just as the 19th century was called the Machine Age and the 20th century the Information Age, the 21st century promises to go down in history as the Quantum Age. However, can we really claim to fully understand quantum mechanical principles? How much do we really believe of what we know? Answers to such questions require us to revisit the fundamental postulates of quantum mechanics and perform precision theoretical and experimental investigations to come up with the right bounds. In this talk, I will describe such attempts by me and others in the last few years [1,2,3]. I will describe in detail a recent theoretical result whereby we can propose table top experiments to detect non-classical paths in the Feynman path integral formalism using simple interference based experiments [4].
1. U.Sinha et al. Science 329 418 - 421, 2010.
2. I.Sollener et al. Found. Phys. 42 742 – 751, 2012.
3. D.K.Park et al. New J. Phys. 14 113025, 2012.
4. R.Sawant et al. Submitted, 2013.