Another achievement for Schrödinger’s cat, the one that in the world of quantum mechanics is capable of being alive and dead until someone takes the trouble to check it. This time, A group of researchers decided to “put” the animal protagonist of the famous paradox inside a silicon chip. The goal? Try to overcome some of the obstacles that oppose the realization of a quantum computer. The results were published in the journal Nature Physics.
What does the study say?
Before delving into the new research of Nature, Let’s define what exactly Schrödinger’s cat is. Theorized in 1935, by the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger, It is a hypothetical experiment that consists of locking a cat in a box with lethal poison; the integrity of the feline will be decided by a cascade mechanism that will spread the radioactive substance or keep the poison bottle intact. The paradox of it being “alive and dead at the same time” is only valid until someone looks inside the box and determines the true state of the animal.
At that point, the two states are no longer possible simultaneously, since only one of them has been verified. It is basically a logical exercise used to describe the superposition of different quantum states. In the specific case of the research that has just been published, Schrödinger’s cat is represented by an antimony atom. The latter is a heavy atom that has a large nuclear spin, that is, a large magnetic dipole. “The antimony spin can take up to eight different directions, instead of just two,” explains Xi Yu, first author of the study and a researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
According to the authors, this is an advantage: “A quantum bit, or ‘qubit’, is typically used as the basic unit of quantum information,” describes second author Benjamin Wilhelm. Explain that if the qubit is a spin, we can call the state ‘0’ ‘spin down’ and the state ‘1’ ‘spin up’. But if the direction of the spin suddenly changes, there is a logical error: 0 becomes 1 or vice versa, all at once. This is why quantum information is so fragile. However, new approach reduces system errors: “As the saying goes, a cat has nine lives. A small scratch is not enough to kill it. Our metaphorical ‘cat’ has seven lives: it would take seven consecutive errors to turn a ‘0’ into a ‘1’“Yu continues.
A technique to model the seismic waves recorded on the planet revealed that, in the intermediate layer of the Earth, there are structures of unknown nature.
An “atomic cat” inside a chip
As predicted, Schrödinger’s cat, i.e. the antimony atom, was placed inside a silicon chip similar to those found in our laptops or phones, but adapted to “quantum needs”: “By housing the ‘atomic cat’ inside a silicon chip, we gain unique control over its quantum state or, if you will, over its life and death,” says Danielle Holmes, co-author of the study. Housing the ‘cat’ inside silicon could be extended to other technologies, using methods similar to those already used to build the computer chips we have today.
Article originally published in WIRED Italy. Adapted by Alondra Flores.
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