Experimental First-Photon Visualization of Quantum Erasure With Hybrid Entanglement

The complementarity principle, as the cornerstone of quantum information, is both counterintuitive and inherently characterized by mutual exclusivity. In this work, we construct a quantum erasure scheme utilizing polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) two-photon hybrid entanglement, and develop a first-photon physics-enhanced dual-branch residual attention network with physical constraints to visualize the disappearance and reappearance of single-photon petal-like interference patterns, with much fewer than one photon per pixel and without the need for exhaustive detection of all OAM modes. This work not only helps people to deepen their intuitive understanding of the which-path concept in quantum mechanics, but also advances quantum imaging in the visualization of subtle changing quantum phenomena.