Related papers: How many lives does Schr\"odinger's cat have?
Schroedinger's famous thought experiment involves a (macroscopic) cat whose quantum state becomes entangled with that of a (microscopic) decaying nucleus. The creation of such micro-macro entanglement is currently being pursued in several…
Superpositions of macroscopically distinct quantum states, introduced in Schroedinger's famous Gedankenexperiment, are an epitome of quantum "strangeness" and a natural tool for determining the validity limits of quantum physics. The…
The superposition principle is one of the most fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. According to the Schr\"odinger equation, a physical system can be in any linear combination of its possible states. While the validity of this…
Recent experiments with superconducting qubits are motivated by the goal of fabricating a quantum computer, but at the same time they illuminate the more fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. In this paper we analyze the physics of…
Macroscopic realism (MR) specifies that where a system can be found in one of two macroscopically distinguishable states (a cat being dead or alive), the system is always predetermined to be in one or other of the two states (prior to…
The paper attempts to convince that the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics does not contradict philosophical realism by throwing light onto certain properties of quantum systems that seem to have escaped attention as yet. The…
Modeling the Schr\"{o}dinger cat by a two state system and assuming that the cat is coupled to the environment we look for the least paradoxical states of the Schr\"{o}dinger cat in the following way. We require the reduced density matrix…
Quantum superpositions of distinct coherent states in a single-mode harmonic oscillator, known as "cat states", have been an elegant demonstration of Schrodinger's famous cat paradox. Here, we realize a two-mode cat state of electromagnetic…
The Schr\"odinger cat state plays a crucial role in quantum theory, and has important fundamental as well as technological implications, ranging from quantum measurement theory to quantum computers. The power of the potential implications…
We consider the characterization of quantum superposition states beyond the pattern "dead and alive". We propose a measure that is applicable to superpositions of multiple macroscopically distinct states, superpositions with different…
Schrodinger's famous cat has long been misunderstood. According to quantum theory and experiments with entangled systems, an entangled state such as the Schrodinger's cat state is neither a superposition of states of either subsystem nor a…
In this paper we re-investigate the core of Schroedinger's 'cat paradox'. We argue that one has to distinguish clearly between superpositions of macroscopic cat states and superpositions of entangled states which comprise both the state of…
The paradigm of Schr\"{o}dinger's cat illustrates how quantum states preclude the assignment of definite properties to a macroscopic object (realism). In this work we develop a method to investigate the indefiniteness of cat states using…
Schr\"{o}dinger's famous Gedankenexperiment involving a cat is used as a motivation to discuss the evolution of states of the composition of classical and quantum systems in the groupoid formalism for physical theories introduced recently.…
We propose a measure for the "size" of a Schroedinger cat state, i.e. a quantum superposition of two many-body states with (supposedly) macroscopically distinct properties, by counting how many single-particle operations are needed to map…
Both at formal and philosophical levels, decades of efforts have been devoted to a deciphering of the `quantum enigma', the `crazy way quantum objects behave', to quote R.P. Feynman's words. We posit that the enigma cannot recede without…
What if someone built a "box" that applies quantum superposition not just to quantum bits in the microscopic but also to macroscopic everyday "objects", such as Schr\"odinger's cat or a human being? If that were possible, and if the…
Investigated idea was actuated by the old opinion that a measurement of a quantum observable should be regarded a as a single deterministic sampling. But, according to the last decades studies, such observables are veritable random…
We demonstrate an exact equivalence between classical population dynamics and Lindbladian evolution admitting a dark state and obeying a set of certain local symmetries. We then introduce {\em quantum population dynamics} as models in which…
With 2025 being declared the Year of Quantum Science and Technology, our contribution seeks to provide a fresh perspective on Schr\"odinger's cat thought experiment. We reinterpret this experiment by viewing it through the lens of quantum…