{"id":162547,"date":"2023-04-21T02:22:57","date_gmt":"2023-04-21T07:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/heaviest-schrodinger-cat-achieved-by-putting-a-small-crystal-into-a-superposition-of-two-oscillation-states"},"modified":"2023-04-21T02:22:57","modified_gmt":"2023-04-21T07:22:57","slug":"heaviest-schrodinger-cat-achieved-by-putting-a-small-crystal-into-a-superposition-of-two-oscillation-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/heaviest-schrodinger-cat-achieved-by-putting-a-small-crystal-into-a-superposition-of-two-oscillation-states","title":{"rendered":"Heaviest Schr\u00f6dinger cat achieved by putting a small crystal into a superposition of two oscillation states"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/heaviest-schrodinger-cat-achieved-by-putting-a-small-crystal-into-a-superposition-of-two-oscillation-states2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Even if you are not a quantum physicist, you will most likely have heard of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s famous cat. Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger came up with the feline that can be alive and dead at the same time in a thought experiment in 1935. The obvious contradiction\u2014after all, in everyday life we only ever see cats that are either alive or dead\u2014has prompted scientists to try to realize analogous situations in the laboratory. So far, they have managed to do so using, for instance, atoms or molecules in quantum mechanical superposition states of being in two places at the same time.<\/p>\n<p>At ETH, a team of researchers led by Yiwen Chu, professor at the Laboratory for Solid State Physics, has now created a substantially heavier Schr\u00f6dinger cat by putting a small crystal into a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/superposition\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">superposition<\/a> of two oscillation states. Their results, which have been published this week in the journal <i>Science<\/i>, could lead to more robust quantum bits and shed light on the mystery of why quantum superpositions are not observed in the macroscopic world.<\/p>\n<p>In Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s original <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/thought+experiment\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">thought experiment<\/a>, a cat is locked up inside a metal box together with a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter and a flask of poison. In a certain time-frame\u2014an hour, say\u2014an atom in the substance may or may not decay through a quantum mechanical process with a certain probability, and the decay products might cause the Geiger counter to go off and trigger a mechanism that smashes the flask containing the poison, which would eventually kill the cat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even if you are not a quantum physicist, you will most likely have heard of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s famous cat. Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger came up with the feline that can be alive and dead at the same time in a thought experiment in 1935. The obvious contradiction\u2014after all, in everyday life we only ever see cats that are [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}