As this report states, physicists have been able to bring “the bizarre behavior of the quantum world to larger scales than ever before.” Various publications are calling it the world’s heaviest or largest Schrödinger’s cat.
The experiment can be summarised as:
“The trick, performed by vibrating 100 million billion atoms inside a sand-grain-sized sapphire crystal, created the world’s heaviest quantum superposition as the crystal simultaneously oscillated in two different directions.”
This is important because:
“As most quantum effects typically decohere and disappear at macroscopic scales, Schrödinger’s analogy was meant to demonstrate the fundamental differences between our world and the world of the very small. Yet no hard limit exists between the two realms, enabling physicists to begin cajoling complex, near-macroscopic-scale objects into showing freaky quantum behavior.”
Of course, this could have far-reaching consequences for quantum technologies like quantum computing.
Read the full report here.
Reblogger 