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Objective Reduction of the Wave Function Demonstrated on Superconducting Quantum Compute

Quantum Physics 2025-04-07 v1 Computational Physics

Abstract

We describe an experiment using superconducting transmon qubits that demonstrates wavefunction collapse consistent with Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) - the theory of consciousness proposed by Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. The experiment performs a partial measurement on a qubit. It uses the result of that measurement to move an estimated 10e-12 kg of mass in one of two locations separated by approximately 1 mm. In standard quantum mechanics, the partial measurement leaves the system in an improper mixture, a state that appears probabilistic but retains quantum coherence. This is mathematically indistinguishable from a proper mixture, where the state has genuinely collapsed. According to Penrose's theory, improper mixtures can lead to gravitationally induced collapse. Results of our experiment show a change in the circuit evolution that is consistent with wavefunction collapse driven by such an improper mixture. The experiment is performed on an IBM Eagle 127-qubit processor using IBM's programming framework Qiskit.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.02914,
  title  = {Objective Reduction of the Wave Function Demonstrated on Superconducting Quantum Compute},
  author = {James Tagg and William Reid},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.02914},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:45:49.819Z