How to administer an antidote to Schr\"{o}dinger's cat
Abstract
In his 1935 Gedankenexperiment, Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger imagined a poisonous substance which has a 50% probability of being released, based on the decay of a radioactive atom. As such, the life of the cat and the state of the poison become entangled, and the fate of the cat is determined upon opening the box. We present an experimental technique that keeps the cat alive on any account. This method relies on the time-resolved Hong-Ou-Mandel effect: two long, identical photons impinging on a beam splitter always bunch in either of the outputs. Interpreting the first photon detection as the state of the poison, the second photon is identified as the state of the cat. Even after the collapse of the first photon's state, we show their fates are intertwined through quantum interference. We demonstrate this by a sudden phase change between the inputs, administered conditionally on the outcome of the first detection, which steers the second photon to a pre-defined output and ensures that the cat is always observed alive.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2106.09705,
title = {How to administer an antidote to Schr\"{o}dinger's cat},
author = {Juan-Rafael Álvarez and Mark IJspeert and Oliver Barter and Ben Yuen and Thomas D. Barrett and Dustin Stuart and Jerome Dilley and Annemarie Holleczek and Axel Kuhn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.09705},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures, including supplementary material with 4 pages and 4 figures