Schrödinger’s cat just got a little bit fatter. Physicists have created the largest ever ‘superposition’ — a quantum state in which an object exists in a haze of possible locations at once.
A team based at the University of Vienna put individual clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium metal some 8 nanometres wide into a superposition of different locations, each spaced 133 nanometres apart. Rather than shoot through the experimental set up like a billiard ball, each chunky cluster behaved like a wave, spreading out into a superposition of spatially distinct paths and then interfering to form a pattern researchers could detect.
“It’s a fantastic result,” says Sandra Eibenberger-Arias, a physicist at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin.
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