Asymmetric-Loss Equal-Born Test (ALEBT): a pre-registered search for record-information-dependent optical loss

Authors: Bob Cecil (Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada) and Mark Trewick (County Durham, UK), independent researchers. Associated paper (Zenodo, CC-BY-4.0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22678044 Standard linear optics requires the transmittance of an optic to be independent of photon number. This study tests that equality directly at the 10⁻⁴ level using a weak scatterer in one arm of a 50/50 beam splitter, comparing a photon-counting measurement against a radiometric one through identical geometry. The experiment is a null test. The pre-registered expectation of the authors is that the null holds; the hypothesis under test predicts a specific, small, negative deviation with a stated functional form: Δ = D_quantum − D_classical = −λ*·(−p ln p), i.e. −0.046·λ* at a 1% transmission deficit, where D is the half-difference of the two-arm log-ratio under an ABBA swap of the scatterer. Standard quantum mechanics fixes Δ = 0 exactly. This registration freezes the protocol, the prediction, the blinding, the corrections, the stopping rule and the decision rule before any bench is borrowed and before any data exist. The result will be published in either direction; a null is reported as a bound on λ* at 95% confidence.