Physicists Create the Fattest Schrödinger's Cat Ever
upstart writes:
A recent experiment tested the mass-based boundaries between the quantum and classical realms:
Picture a cat. I'm assuming you're imagining a live one. It doesn't matter. You're wrong either way-but you're also right. This is the premise of Erwin Schrodinger's 1935 thought experiment to describe quantum states, and now, researchers have managed to create a fat (which is to say, massive) Schrodinger cat, testing the limits of the quantum world and where it gives way to classical physics.
Schrodinger's experiment is thus: A cat is in a box with a poison that is released from its container if an atom of a radioactive substance, also in the box, decays. Because it is impossible to know whether or not the substance will decay in a given timeframe, the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened and some objective truth is determined. [...]
In the same way, particles in quantum states (qubits, if they're being used as bits in a quantum computer) are in a quantum superposition (which is to say, both "alive" and "dead") until they're measured, at which point the superposition breaks down. Unlike ordinary computer bits that hold a value of either 0 or 1, qubits can be both 0 and 1 simultaneously.
Now, researchers made a Schrodinger's cat that's much heavier than those previously created, testing the muddy waters where the world of quantum mechanics gives way to the classical physics of the familiar macroscopic world. Their research is published this week in the journal Science.
In the place of the hypothetical cat was a small crystal, put in a superposition of two oscillation states. The oscillation states (up or down) are equivalent to alive or dead in Schrodinger's thought experiment. A superconducting circuit, effectively a qubit, was used to represent the atom. The team coupled electric-field creating material to the circuit, allowing its superposition to transfer over to the crystal. Capiche?
"By putting the two oscillation states of the crystal in a superposition, we have effectively created a Schrodinger cat weighing 16 micrograms," said Yiwen Chu, a physicist at ETH Zurich and the study's lead author, in a university release.
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