Analyzing a Spin-1 Interferometer
Highlights of the activity
- Students are placed into small groups and must find the final probabilities that result from different beam configurations of a Spin-1 interferometer.
- The small groups will also practice using projection operators in a spin-1 system to find the states in a spin-1 system resulting from the combination of several Stern-Gerlach output beams.
Reasons to spend class time on the activity
Generally, students have already performed the Analysis of a spin-1/2 interferometer and are familiar with using the projection operator to predict the bra-ket representation of states produced by several beams combining in an interferometer. This activity gives students an opportunity to explicitly calculate the projected states in bra-ket notation, find the theoretical probability of a particular result occuring, and compare the theoretical value to the experimentally measured probabilities.