Schrödinger's cat with 20 qubits

Dead or alive, left-spinning or right-spinning—in the quantum world particles such as the famous analogy of Schrödinger's cat can be all these things at the same time. An international team, including researchers from several leading American universities, together with experts from Forschungszentrum Jülich, have now succeeded in transforming 20 entangled quantum bits into such a state of superposition. The generation of such atomic Schrödinger cat states is regarded as an important step in the development of quantum computers which could outperform classical computers in solving certain tasks. The results were published in Science last Friday.