Scientists have obtained an image of Schrödinger’s cat

Anyone who has ever heard of quantum mechanics has probably heard the story of Schrödinger’s cat: the thought experiment of Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, where a cat left in a box with a dangerous radioactive substance can simultaneously be in two states – dead and alive. So, modern scientists from Vienna and New York managed to prove this possibility to some extent when taking into account quantum entanglement.

The image above was taken using a cat stencil and entangled photons. The interesting thing here is that the photons that were used to create the image never interacted with the stencil, and the photons that were stenciled were never actually directed into the camera.

According to quantum mechanics, when two separate particles are in a state of entanglement, their physical properties are superimposed on each other, and they begin to be in the same quantum state, in a state of superposition. In other words, a cat can be both dead and alive at the same time. So Gabriela Barreto Lemos of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and her colleagues, using this quantum connection between particles, were able to create an image of a cat without directly photographing its stencil.

To do this, the scientists used lasers to create two pairs of yellow and red entangled photons. Yellow photons were directed at the stencil of the cat, and red photons were directed at the camera. Due to their entanglement, red photons have taken over the physical properties of yellow photons and formed an image of a cat. Since the cat’s stencil was transparent in red light, the camera could only detect red light. The experiment demonstrated that this technique allows you to make images of objects invisible to the detected photons.



Source: hi-news.ru

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