Cheating on Complementarity and Interference by Translational – Internal Entanglement

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.