Experimental measurement of mixed state geometric phase by quantum interferometry using NMR

Geometric phase has been proposed as one of the promising methodologies to perform fault tolerant quantum computations. However, since decoherence plays a crucial role in such studies, understanding of mixed state geometric phase has become important. While mixed state geometric phase was first introduced mathematically by Uhlmann, recently Sjöqvist et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 (14) (2000) 2845] have described the mixed state geometric phase in the context of quantum interference and shown theoretically that the visibility as well as the shift of the interference pattern are functions of geometric phase and the purity of the mixed state. Here we report the first experimental study of the dependence of interference visibility and shift of the interference pattern on the mixed state geometric phase by nuclear magnetic resonance.