Elitzur Vaidman bomb-tester

In physics, the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-testing problem is a thought experiment in quantum mechanics, first proposed by Avshalom Elitzur and Lev Vaidman in 1993. An actual bomb-tester was constructed and successfully tested by Anton Zeilinger, Paul Kwiat, Harald Weinfurter, and Thomas Herzog in 1994. It employs a Mach-Zehnder interferometer for ascertaining whether a measurement has taken place. The following example illustrates the bomb-testing problem: Consider a collection of bombs, some of whi ...