Talk:Coincidence counting (physics)

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)

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)