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Collapse of Quantum Wavefunction Captured In Slow Motion
ananyo writes "It is the most fundamental, and yet also the strangest postulate of the theory of quantum mechanics: the idea that a quantum system will catastrophically collapse from a blend of several possible quantum states to just one the moment it is measured by an experimentalist. Researchers have now been able to capture that collapse through the use of weak measurements — indirect probes of quantum systems that tweak a wavefunction slightly while providing partial information about its state, avoiding a sudden collapse. Atomic and solid-state physicist Kater Murch of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues performed a series of weak measurements on a superconducting circuit that was in a superposition — a combination of two quantum states. They did this by monitoring microwaves that had passed through a box containing the circuit, based on the fact that the circuit's electrical oscillations alter the state of the microwaves as they pass through the box. Over a couple of microseconds, those weak measurements captured snapshots of the state of the circuit as it gradually changed from a superposition to just one of the states within that superposition — as if charting the collapse of a quantum wavefunction in slow motion."
Everyone knows that when you try to capture a quantum state on video, all you end up with is cats. How else do you explain all the cat videos on Youtube?
Correlation does not imply causation
Well, if we're going to toss out /. comments that are unrelated to the article ... hmmm....
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these superconductors!"
"It only collapsed because of anticompetitive market practices through a series of shell companies that Microsoft controls."
or
"I'm not sure what to think of this until PJ tells me what to think. I'm so PISSED at the NSA for taking her from me!"
I did and I didn't.
±5 Funny
Everybody's got an iPhone these days!
Great. Filmed in portrait.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
That can't be true; if it were, more of them would be dead.
What did you expect a video of, exactly?
Well, I was expecting a slow motion video of the collapse of a quantum wavefunction, myself.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
As I'm in the UK, I'd prefer to call it American-style HandEgg. Football is a game played using a (round) ball and predominately using your feet.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
You fool! You weren't supposed to look!