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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."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fSqFWcb4rE
They have a video camera that takes frames faster than light can travel, so they have the technology. Problem is it requires the subject to be ungodly bright.
No. No they don't. They have a "camera" with a very fast shutter speed. Then they take millions of pictures of different laser pulses and stitch them together to create an animation that mimics a single laser pulse.
I know that the comments on youtube are pretty poor and that most people rarely read articles but this is a really cool video and if you can't be bothered to understand what you're looking at then I feel sorry for you.