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Scientists put a jiggling piece of sapphire crystal in what’s known as a “cat state,” in which an object exists in two different states simultaneously. It’s a situation reminiscent of physicists’ favorite imaginary feline, Schrödinger’s cat, known for being alive and dead at the same time.
The new sapphire cat is a relatively hefty 16 micrograms, physicists report in the April 21 Science. That’s close to half the mass of an eyelash, and more than 100 trillion times the mass of cat states previously created with molecules. In the new experiment, the researchers jiggled a portion of a sapphire crystal in such a way that its atoms moved in two directions at once. That’s a distinction that “captures the spirit” of Schrödinger’s cat.
In a quantum parable dreamt up in the 1930s by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, a cat is trapped in a box and, due to quantum effects, winds up alive and dead at the same time (SN: 5/26/16). This paradoxical scenario doesn’t happen in the real world.
The jiggling was confined within a sliver of the crystal consisting of 100 million billion atoms. That’s large enough that, if extracted from the rest of the crystal, it would be visible to the naked eye.
Scientists put a jiggling piece of sapphire crystal in what’s known as a “cat state,” in which an object exists in two different states simultaneously. It’s a situation reminiscent of physicists’ favorite imaginary feline, Schrödinger’s cat, known for being alive and dead at the same time.
The new sapphire cat is a relatively hefty 16 micrograms, physicists report in the April 21 Science. That’s close to half the mass of an eyelash, and more than 100 trillion times the mass of cat states previously created with molecules. In the new experiment, the researchers jiggled a portion of a sapphire crystal in such a way that its atoms moved in two directions at once. That’s a distinction that “captures the spirit” of Schrödinger’s cat.
In a quantum parable dreamt up in the 1930s by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, a cat is trapped in a box and, due to quantum effects, winds up alive and dead at the same time (SN: 5/26/16). This paradoxical scenario doesn’t happen in the real world.
The jiggling was confined within a sliver of the crystal consisting of 100 million billion atoms. That’s large enough that, if extracted from the rest of the crystal, it would be visible to the naked eye.
