Entanglement-interference complementarity and experimental demonstration in a superconducting circuit

Quantum entanglement between an interfering particle and a detector for acquiring the which-path information plays a central role for enforcing Bohr’s complementarity principle. However, the quantitative relation between this entanglement and the fringe visibility remains untouched upon for an initial mixed state. Here we find an equality for quantifying this relation. Our equality characterizes how well the interference pattern can be preserved when an interfering particle, initially carrying a definite amount of coherence, is entangled, to a certain degree, with a which-path detector. This equality provides a connection between entanglement and interference in the unified framework of coherence, revealing the quantitative entanglement-interference complementarity. We experimentally demonstrate this relation with a superconducting circuit, where a resonator serves as a which-path detector for an interfering qubit. The measured fringe visibility of the qubit’s Ramsey signal and the qubit-resonator entanglement exhibit a complementary relation, in well agreement with the theoretical prediction.