Paper detail

Group theoretic formulation of complementarity

We generalize Bohr's complementarity principle for wave and particle properties to arbitrary quantum systems. We begin by noting that a particle-like state is represented by a spatially-localized wave function and its narrow probability density is displaced by spatial translations. In contrast a wave-like state is represented by a spatially-delocalized wave function and the corresponding broad position probability density is invariant to spatial translations. The wave-particle dichotomy can therefore be seen as a competition between displacement and invariance of the state with respect to spatial translations. We generalize this dichotomy to arbitrary quantum systems with finite dimensional Hilbert spaces as follows. We use arbitrary finite symmetry groups to represent transformations of the quantum system. The symmetry (i.e. invariance) or asymmetry (i.e. displacement) of a given state with respect to transformations of the group are identified with the generalized wave and particle nature, respectively. We adopt a measure of wave and particle properties based on the amount of information that can be encoded in the symmetric and asymmetric parts of the state.