Coherent Beam Splitting by a Thin Grating

Abstract

The wide use of beam splitters in quantum interferometry, attosecond metrology, modern quantum information processing, foundations of quantum mechanics, has been based on coherence of beams emerging from a beam splitter. Here we further develop the approach in which a beam splitter is regarded as a transformer of an incident wave field (photon field or matter wave field) into a field which has narrow maxima at the points along and in close vicinity of two or more particular lines. This description was derived by considering a thin grating as a model of a beam splitter for photons, atoms and molecules. It is applied to answer some questions raised in the discussions on the interpretation of wave particle duality.