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The aim of this paper is to revisit the implications of complementarity when we inject into a Mach Zehnder interferometer particles with internal structure, prepared in special translational-internal entangled (TIE) intraparticle states. This correlation causes the path distinguishability to be interferometric phase-dependent in contrast to the standard case, where distinguishability depends on some external parameters (not interferometric phase). We show that such a TIE state permits us to detect small phase shifts along with almost perfect path distinguishability, beyond the constraints imposed by complementarity on simultaneous which-way and which-phase measurements for cases when distinguishability is uncoupled to interferometric phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that if internal and momentum states of an interfering particle are entangled, then by measuring its internal state we may infer both path (corpuscular) and phase (wavelike) information with practically any precision, without the complementarity constraints of which-path detection. This holds also for multipath–multistate configurations, allowing large amounts of information to be stored in a single particle. We further show that highly complex particles (e.g., molecules or macroscopic bodies) subject to fields that couple (entangle) their internal and translational (momentum) states may undergo an irresversible randomization (diffusion), manifest by the disappearance of the interference pattern, as if they are subject to decoherence. Thus, translational-internal entanglement can give rise to anomalies in quantum wavepacket propagation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The behavior of translationally–internally entangled (TIE) states in an interferometer of the Mach–Zehnder type is studied, by means of a game whose results show that TIE states allow near-certain guessing of both path (corpuscular) and phase (wavelike) features, as opposed to conventional states that are constrained by standard complementarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]