Your average cat contains more than a hundred million billion billion atoms. So that’s how many atoms would need to be ‘entangled’ via quantum mechanics to realise Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, in which the random decay of a single atom could cause a cat in a box to be somehow alive and dead at the same time.
We’re not quite there yet, but researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland have announced a dramatic step in this direction by creating and verifying a single quantum state of 16 million atoms. While the entanglement of pairs of particles is a common feat in laboratories, multi-particle entanglement is more complex and the previous record was a mere 2900 atoms.
The achievement was “a side project” according to Florian Fröwis, the lead author of a paper describing the research in Nature Communications. It grew from work to develop a ‘quantum memory’ device that can store single photons for use in futuristic communications networks.
“We always had the suspicion that the storage of a single photon should create entanglement between a large number of atoms,” he says.
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