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American Institute of Physics, AIP Conference Proceedings

DOI: 10.1063/1.3109942

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Testing Born's Rule in Quantum Mechanics with a Triple Slit Experiment

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

In Mod. Phys. Lett. A 9, 3119 (1994), one of us (R.D.S) investigated a formulation of quantum mechanics as a generalized measure theory. Quantum mechanics computes probabilities from the absolute squares of complex amplitudes, and the resulting interference violates the (Kolmogorov) sum rule expressing the additivity of probabilities of mutually exclusive events. However, there is a higher order sum rule that quantum mechanics does obey, involving the probabilities of three mutually exclusive possibilities. We could imagine a yet more general theory by assuming that it violates the next higher sum rule. In this paper, we report results from an ongoing experiment that sets out to test the validity of this second sum rule by measuring the interference patterns produced by three slits and all the possible combinations of those slits being open or closed. We use attenuated laser light combined with single photon counting to confirm the particle character of the measured light. ; Comment: Submitted to the proceedings of Foundations of Probability and Physics-5, Vaxjo, Sweden, August 2008. 8 pages, 8 figures