Paper detail

Interference with non-interacting free particles and a special type of detector

We develop a classical picture of interference for non-interacting individual classical massive free particles. As long as they remain undetected, particles carry the information of a phase equal to an action integral along their trajectory. At the point of their detection, a special type of detector collects the phases from all individual particles reaching it, adds them up over time as complex numbers, and divides them by the square root of their number. The detector announces a number of detections equal to the square of the amplitude of the resulting complex number. An interference pattern is gradually built from the collection of particle phases in the detection bins of the detector after several repetitions of the experiment. We obtain perfect agreement with three solutions of the Schrödinger equation for free particles: a Gaussian wavepacket, two Gaussian wavepackets approaching each other, and a Gaussian wavepacket reflecting off a wall.