Related papers: A reason why we do not observe Schr\"odinger's cat…
By comparing Schr\"odinger's cat with its classical counterpart, I show that a quantum superposition should be understood as an expectation over possible eigenstates weighted by wave-like probabilities. Upon the occurrence of a certain…
The motion of a ball through an appropriate lattice of round obstacles models the behavior of a Brownian particle and can be used to describe measurement on a macro system. On another hand, such motion is chaotic and a known conjecture…
Mesoscopic quantum superpositions, or Schr\"odinger cat states, are widely studied for fundamental investigations of quantum measurement and decoherence as well as applications in sensing and quantum information science. The generation and…
Schr\"odinger's famous Gedankenexperiment has inspired multiple generations of physicists to think about apparent paradoxes that arise when the logic of quantum physics is applied to macroscopic objects. The development of quantum…
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…
Quantum theory has evolved from a set of provisional rules to an indispensable framework that underlies much of modern technology and infrastructure. Yet, after a century, Born's probability postulate remains at odds with the theory's…
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…
In a previous paper we examined the role of a conscious observer in a typical quantum mechanical measurement. Four rules were given that were found to govern the stochastic choice and state reduction in several cases of continuous and…
We give a general proof showing that once irreversible processes are involved, a class of projective measurements is impossible. Applying this no-go result to the Schroedinger's cat paradox implies that if something is claimed to be a real…
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…
There are four reasons why our present knowledge and understanding of quantum mechanics could be regarded as incomplete. Firstly, the principle of linear superposition has not been experimentally tested for position eigenstates of objects…
The inability of Schrodinger's unitary time evolution to describe measurement of a quantum state remains a central foundational problem. It was recently suggested that the unitarity of Schrodinger dynamics can be spontaneously broken,…
Quantum measurement finds the observed system in a collapsed state, rather than in the state predicted by the Schr\"odinger equation. Yet there is a relatively spread opinion that the wavefunction collapse can be explained by unitary…
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…
Macroscopic quantum optical effects (Schrodinger cat states, squeezing, collapse and revival) for light beams propagating in an inhomogeneous linear medium are demonstrated using exact analytical solutions of wave equation. It is shown that…
We summarize a recently proposed resolution of the quantum measurement problem. It stems from an insight into entanglement demonstrated in a 1991 experiment involving photon momenta. This experiment shows that, when two superposed quantum…
A number of authors have proposed stochastic versions of the Schr\"odinger equation, either as effective evolution equations for open quantum systems or as alternative theories with an intrinsic collapse mechanism. We discuss here two…
Experimental progress with meso- and macroscopic quantum states (i.e., general Schrodinger-cat states) was recently accompanied by theoretical proposals on how to measure the merit of these efforts. So far, experiment and theory were…
In this presentation, I argue that weak measurements empirically support the notion of quantum superpositions as statistical alternatives. In short, weak measurements show that Schroedinger's cat is already dead or alive before the…
Macroscopic quantum superpositions are widely believed to be unobservable because large systems cannot be perfectly isolated from their environments. Here, we show that even under perfect isolation, intrinsic unitary dynamics with the…