Can I Make a Superposition of a Cat Being Alive or Dead?

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Physicists are trying to make quantum systems bigger and still be quantum. Can i make a superposition of a group of atoms either all being in their ground states or allbeing in their excited states? And fundamentally, its unknown which of those scenariosis the one we're in until we do a measurement rightly. That actually turns out to be a state that is potentially very useful if you can make it s a resource for improving precision measurements of time.

When it comes to thinking about quantum mechanics, there are levels. One level is shut-up-and-calculate: find a wave function, square it to get a probability. One level is foundational: dig deeply into the underlying ontology. But there’s a level in between, long neglected but recently coming to life. In this level you think about — or do experiments with — entangled quantum systems in the real world, putting entanglement to use. Monika Schleier-Smith is an experimental physicist specializing in cold atoms, which can be both entangled and manipulated. We discuss how to use such systems to study everything from metrology to quantum gravity.

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Monika Schleier-Smith received her Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently an Associate Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and the I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics from the American Physical Society.

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