Related papers: Nature abhors macroscopic superpositions
The superposition principle is at the heart of quantum mechanics and at the root of many paradoxes arising when trying to extend its predictions to our everyday world. Schroedinger's cat is the prototype of such paradoxes and here, in…
The iconic Schr\"odinger's cat state describes a system that may be in a superposition of two macroscopically distinct states, for example two clearly separated oscillator coherent states. Quite apart from their role in understanding the…
We extend several measurement-based definitions of effective "cat-size" to coherent state superpositions with branches composed of either single coherent states or tensor products of coherent states. These effective cat-size measures depend…
The entangled Schrodinger cat state obtained immediately upon measurement of a superposed two-state quantum system is often considered paradoxical because it appears to predict two macroscopically different outcomes, such as an alive and…
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…
Schr\"odinger's cat originates from the famous thought experiment querying the counterintuitive quantum superposition of macroscopic objects. As a natural extension, several "cats" (quasi-classical objects) can be prepared into coherent…
Quantum mechanics is an extremely successful theory that agrees with every experiment. However, the principle of linear superposition, a central tenet of the theory, apparently contradicts a commonplace observation: macroscopic objects are…
Mass-superselection rule (MSR) states that in the non-relativistic quantum theory superpositions of states with different masses are unphysical. While MSR features even in textbooks, its validity, physical content and consequences remain…
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the generation of superposition of coherent states with opposite phases, the so-called photonic Schrodinger-cat states. These experiments are very challenging and so far, cats…
Parallel worlds are imaginative ideas in quantum mechanics and cosmology. The superpositions of parallel worlds are novel states of quantum gravity and have no classical correspondences generally. In this letter, we investigate the…
An outstanding mystery of dark matter physics is the lack of direct detection signals to date. We suggest that dark matter is scatophobic: due to a repulsive long-range interaction, it is repelled by objects with a large net scat charge,…
The Wehrl information entropy and its phase density, the so-called Wehrl phase distribution, are applied to describe Schr\"odinger cat and cat-like (kitten) states. The advantages of the Wehrl phase distribution over the Wehrl entropy in a…
We study why it is quite so hard to make a superposition of superfluid flows in a Bose-Einstein condensate. To do this we initially investigate the quantum states of $N$ atoms trapped in a 1D ring with a barrier at one position and a phase…
We consider a thought experiment where the preparation of a macroscopically massive or charged particle in a quantum superposition and the associated dynamics of a distant test particle apparently allow for superluminal communication. We…
Schr\"odinger's illustration of an imaginary cat in a box, neither alive nor dead, leads to a question of whether and how long a macroscopic quantum superposition can exist in various situations. It is well known that a macroscopic…
The pointer states and preferred basis of the classical world are that of definite positions and momenta. Here it is shown that the reason for the absence of superposition states is the limited resolution with which observations or…
Motivated by recent experiments, we consider a Schr\"{o}dinger cat superposition of two widely separated coherent states in thermal equilibrium. The time development of our system is obtained using Wigner distribution functions. In contrast…
The entangled state that results when a detector measures a superposed quantum system has spawned decades of concern about the problem of definite outcomes or "Schrodinger's cat." This state seems to describe a detector in an indefinite or…
Topological defects (such as monopoles, vortex lines, or domain walls) mark locations where disparate choices of a broken symmetry vacuum elsewhere in the system lead to irreconcilable differences. They are energetically costly (the energy…
The quantum superposition principle is a cornerstone of physics and at the heart of many quantum technologies. Yet, it is still often regarded counterintuitive because we do not observe its key features on the macroscopic scales of our…