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Physicists Made a Flying Army of Laser 'Schrodinger's Cats' (livescience.com)
PolygamousRanchKid quotes LiveScience: A laser pulse bounced off a rubidium atom and entered the quantum world -- taking on the weird physics of "Schrodinger's cat." The laser pulses didn't grow whiskers or paws. But they became like the famous quantum-physics thought experiment Schrodinger's cat in an important way: They were large objects that acted like the simultaneously dead-and-alive creatures of subatomic physics -- existing in a limbo between two simultaneous, contradictory states.
"In our experiment, the [laser cat] was sent to the detector immediately, so it was destroyed right after its creation," said Bastian Hacker, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, who worked on the experiment. But it didn't have to be that way, Hacker told Live Science. "An optical state can live forever. So if we had sent the pulse out into the night sky, it could live for billions of years in its [cat-like] state." That longevity is part of what makes these pulses so useful, he added. A long-lived laser cat can survive long-term travel through an optical fiber, making it a good unit of information for a network of quantum computers... In the new experiment, described in a paper published Jan. 14 in the journal Nature Photonics, researchers created laser pulses that are in superposition between two possible quantum states. They called the little pulses "flying optical cat states...."
"Cat states can encode quantum information in a way that allows [us] to detect optical loss and correct for it. Although every optical transmission has losses, the information can be transmitted perfectly."
"In our experiment, the [laser cat] was sent to the detector immediately, so it was destroyed right after its creation," said Bastian Hacker, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, who worked on the experiment. But it didn't have to be that way, Hacker told Live Science. "An optical state can live forever. So if we had sent the pulse out into the night sky, it could live for billions of years in its [cat-like] state." That longevity is part of what makes these pulses so useful, he added. A long-lived laser cat can survive long-term travel through an optical fiber, making it a good unit of information for a network of quantum computers... In the new experiment, described in a paper published Jan. 14 in the journal Nature Photonics, researchers created laser pulses that are in superposition between two possible quantum states. They called the little pulses "flying optical cat states...."
"Cat states can encode quantum information in a way that allows [us] to detect optical loss and correct for it. Although every optical transmission has losses, the information can be transmitted perfectly."
The cat has jumped the shark.
In what state is the obligatory cat chasing this laser beam?
Have gnu, will travel.
If it's a cat then won't it just ignore you when you want something from it?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
I prefer to think that both the Copenhagen and Many-worlds interpretations are correct.
Try this. This is the actual article (in a reputable journal, no less) that was swallowed to make that pile of shit that is TFA.
If the physicists involved in the experiment actually described anything as "flying optical cat states" then they, and their lab, should be burned to the ground, with the 'journalist' inside.
They do in fact use that phase, here in context: "We then employ the entanglement to control the flying optical cat state by means of a coherent rotation and subsequent measurement of the atomic spin direction." But don't get out your torch and pitchfork just yet, it seems that cat state is actually accepted terminology.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
How can a story that starts out with an army of laser cats turn out to be so disappointing?
But what does it mean? How do you interpret it?
Every interpretation of quantum physics predicts the same experimental results, but the interpretation of them is less clear. And the English translation of the math differs wildly depending on which interpretation you use.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yeah, here's a preprint link. I was actually fooled myself, because the first page looked fine. Sneaky bastards. (I mean, I can get the full article from the publisher's site through my library subscription, but that's beside the point.)