A sapphire crystal weighing 16 micrograms is the largest object ever to exist in a quantum-mechanical superposition of two vibrational states. Matteo Fadel and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) excited the crystal into vibrations such that its atoms oscillated back and forth simultaneously and in two opposite directions—putting the entire crystal in what is known as a state of quantum superposition.
As the research group reports in Science, this condition is much like that of the cat in the famous thought experiment of physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In Schrödinger’s quantum-mechanical scenario, a cat is simultaneously alive and dead, depending on the decay of an atom that releases a vial of poison. The sapphire crystal in the new experiment has been put in the macroscopic equivalent of that “cat state.” Such states can help scientists fathom how and why the laws of the quantum world transition into the rules of classical physics for larger objects.
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