  Thought experiments based on the double-slit interferometer had a crucial
role to develop ideas concerning the wave-particle duality and the Bohr's
complementarity principle. Ideally, a slit with a sufficiently low mass recoils
due to the passage of the photon. This motion denounces the path taken by the
light and suppresses any attempt to observe an interference pattern. In real
life, however, available which-way information in such a setup is significantly
impaired by the typical magnitudes of photons and slits, making the
verification of the effect almost impossible. Here, we extend this discussion
by applying similar ideas to the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. That is, we study
the consequences of the beam-splitter recoil, during the passage of the photon,
over the interference pattern produced by the device. Unlike the double-slit
experiment, this recoil can now be encoded in the wavelength of the photon
itself, which, in principle, is more easily accessed. Fortuitously, the model
used to describe the interaction between the idealized beam-splitter and the
photon clearly indicates that an interferometer based on Compton's effect could
be build to study wave-particle duality. We follow this hint, finding realistic
experimental parameters needed to observe the trade-off between wave and
corpuscular behaviors in such a modified interferometer.
