<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A yet-to-be peer-reviewed study by scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China involved cooling 10,000 ytterbium atoms to just a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero and trapping them using light. Each atom was precisely controlled and placed into a superposition of two distinct spin states. This is known as a \u201cquantum cat\u201d state.<\/p>\n<p>In the famous <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iflscience.com\/tags\/schroedinger-s-cat\" target=\"_blank\">Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat<\/a> thought experiment, we see a cat closed in a box with a poison activated by a random quantum process. Without opening the box, we cannot ascertain the state of the cat, so it is both alive and dead, two contradictory states in the non-quantum reality we experience. In the quantum world, quantum cat states are superpositions where a quantum state can exist in several ways at once, although it\u2019s impossible to tell which one it really is, so it\u2019s effectively all of them at once.<\/p>\n<p>In the recent experiment, it is the length of this quantum cat state that is astounding. In nature, the superposition will collapse into one or the other in a fraction of a second, but here it persisted for 1,400 seconds. The team thinks that with a better vacuum system, it can be made to last even longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A yet-to-be peer-reviewed study by scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China involved cooling 10,000 ytterbium atoms to just a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero and trapping them using light. Each atom was precisely controlled and placed into a superposition of two distinct spin states. This is known as [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219799","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\/219799","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\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}