Physicists manage to ‘breed’ Schrodinger’s cat in breakthrough that could help explain the quantum world
Published: Nineteen:07 BST, one May two thousand seventeen | Updated: 08:41 BST, two May two thousand seventeen
Scientists have developed a way to ‘breed’ Schrodinger’s hypothetical cat in a breakthrough experiment that could bridge the gap inbetween the quantum and the visible – or classical – worlds.
The cat in the famous thought experiment can be alive and dead at the same time, in a quantum phenomenon known as superposition.
But, whether this effect translates to larger objects has long remained a mystery.
Physicists have now created a way to amplify pairs of classical states of light to generate ‘enlarged’ cats, in effort to uncover the limit (if there is one) of the quantum world.
The cat in the famous thought experiment can be alive and dead at the same time, in a quantum phenomenon known as superposition. But, whether this effect translates to larger, macroscopic objects has long remained a mystery. The paradox is illustrated above
SCHRODINGER’S CAT
Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment created by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.
In the hypothetical experiment a cat is placed in a sealed box next to a radioactive sample, a Geiger counter, and a bottle of poison.
The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been cracked, releasing the poison and killing the cat, until the box is opened.
This means the cat is both dead and alive inwards the box, a combination of both states, until the box is opened.
‘One of the fundamental questions of physics is the boundary inbetween the quantum and classical worlds,’ says CIFAR Quantum Information Science Fellow Alexander Lvovsky.
‘Can quantum phenomena, provided ideal conditions, be observed in macroscopic objects?
‘Theory gives no response to this question – maybe there is no such boundary.
‘What we need is a device that will probe it.’
In the fresh experiment, the researchers ‘bred’ the physical analogue of the Schrodinger cat.
This, in this case, is the superposition of two coherent light swings, in which the fields of the electromagnetic swings point in opposite directions at once.
Based on an idea very first proposed over a decade ago by researchers in Australia, the team bred these states to create optical ‘cats’ of higher amplitudes.