American Physical Society March meeting 2022, Chicago, IL

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We investigate the nature of wavefunction (WF) collapse in a welcher weg experiment by observing the physical effects of the so-called empty waves (EWs), more specifically their ability to interfere with real photons to generate first order interference. We spatially superpose the EW of an already-detected photon with the temporally-separated WF of a second photon. We achieve this by sending very weak highly coherent pulses of light into an asymmetrical MZI. To ensure overlap, repetition rate of pulses is set to f = c/OPD, c being speed of light in the medium and OPD the optical path difference (OPD). Both long and short arms have an additional interrogator beamsplitter early in each path so that interrogator photon detectors (IPDs) can detect presence of a photon in each arm. Due to the Poissonian statistics of coherent light, occasionally a photon and an EW arrive at the final BS together, temporally separated by ΔT = OPD/c. Coincidence rate of IPDs and a detector at one of the final BS outputs is measured. Observation of change in coincidence rates that corresponds to interference phenomena would violate the Copenhagen and MW Interpretations. Finally the novel concept of “Quantum Dark States” (D-states) will be introduced as potential cause of observed Cosmological Constant.  (Afshar-2) APS/ARC ©2022