Talk:Coincidence counting (physics)

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Why is coincidence counting unavoidable for eraser experiments? This article explains that its needed to distinguish the entangled particle from other noise, but can't you just do it in a dark enough room so there is no noise? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shahzk (talk • contribs) 15:48, 14 February 2012‎ (UTC)[reply]

In reply to the above (5 years later!): the noise in question isn't caused by light coming from external sources, which can easily be avoided as you have imagined. The noise causing the problem is the non-entangled particles that are coming from the same source and hitting the same detectors. The number of non-entangled particles vastly outnumbers the entangled particles. Since the experiment is only concerned with the entangled particles, the non-entangled particles are considered "noise". Currently the only way to distinguish entangled particles from non-entangled particles (from the same source, hitting the same detectors) is through coincidence counting. Hope that helps.81.110.180.141 (talk) 10:13, 5 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]