A team led by UNSW quantum engineers has created a "Schrödinger's cat" - a famous quantum thought experiment - inside a silicon chip.
UNSW engineers have demonstrated a well-known quantum thought experiment in the real world. Their findings deliver a new and more robust way to perform quantum computations - and they have important implications for error correction, one of the biggest obstacles standing between them and a working quantum computer.
Quantum mechanics has puzzled scientists and philosophers for more than a century. One of the most famous quantum thought experiments is that of the "Schrödinger's cat" - a cat whose life or death depends on the decay of a radioactive atom.
According to quantum mechanics, unless the atom is directly observed, it must be considered to be in a superposition - that is, being in multiple states at the same time - of decayed and not decayed. This leads to the troubling conclusion that the cat is in a superposition of dead and alive.
"No one has ever seen an actual cat in a state of being both dead and alive at the same time, but people use the Schrödinger's cat metaphor to describe a superposition of quantum states that differ by a large amount," says UNSW Professor Andrea Morello, leader of the team that conducted the research, published recently in the journal Nature Physics.
