Related papers: Why we don't see the Schr\"odinger's cat state?
The dephasing influence of a dissipative environment reduces linear superpositions of macroscopically distinct quantum states (sometimes also called Schr\"odinger cat states) usually almost immediately to a statistical mixture. This process…
We study quantum states produced by optimal phase covariant quantum cloners. We argue that cloned quantum superpositions are not macroscopic superpositions in the spirit of Schr\"odinger's cat, despite their large particle number. This is…
We discuss general properties of the equilibrium state of parametric down-conversion in superconducting quantum circuits with detunings and Kerr anharmonicities, in the strongly nonlinear regime. By comparing moments of the steady state and…
We suggest a scheme to generate a macroscopic superposition state (Schrodinger cat state) of a free-propagating optical field using a beam splitter, homodyne measurement and a very small Kerr nonlinear effect. Our scheme makes it possible…
Quantum mechanics marks a radical departure from the classical understanding of Nature, fostering an inherent randomness which forbids a deterministic description; yet the most fundamental departure arises from something different. As shown…
I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to…
General wisdom tells us that if two quantum states are ``macroscopically distinguishable'' then their superposition should be hard to observe. We make this intuition precise and general by quantifying the difficulty to observe the quantum…
All the concepts and principles necessary to understand quantum mechanics on an initial level are given in a form suitable for the non-expert. The concepts explained include visualizing the wave function, wave-particle duality, the…
Disentanglement and loss of quantum correlations due to one global collective noise effect are described for two-qubit Schr\"odinger cat and Werner states of a four level trapped ion quantum system. Once the Jaynes-Cummings ionic…
An interferometric experiment is described that characterizes an optical cat state in a cavity mode. Our method describes how to measure the amplitude and phase of the different coherent states that make up the cat states. We show that…
Left on its own, a quantum state evolves deterministically under the Schr\"odinger Equation, forming superpositions. Upon measurement, however, a stochastic process governed by the Born rule collapses it to a single outcome. This dual…
The Schr\"odinger cat states, constructed from Glauber coherent states and applied for description of qubits are generalized to the kaleidoscope of coherent states, related with regular n-polygon symmetry and the roots of unity. This…
In this paper we consider the phenomenon of superpositions in quantum mechanics and suggest a way to deal with the idea in a logical setting from a syntactical point of view, that is, as subsumed in the language of the formalism, and not…
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…
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…
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…
Epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics fail to address the puzzle posed by the occurrence of probabilities in a fundamental physical theory. This is a puzzle about the physical world, not a puzzle about our relation to the physical…
The measurement problem is to explain why a system which is in a linear combination of states appears, upon measurement, to be in just one of those states. The solution given here is to first show that if one assumes linear, unitary, no…
It is pointed out that Schr\"odinger's celebrated "cat" paradox contains a simple error in reasoning regarding the definition of life. It is then shown that there is no paradox in the context of life as we currently understand it.
After a careful analysis of the feedback model recently proposed by Slosser and Milburn [Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 418 (1995)], we are led to the conclusion that---under realistic conditions---their scheme is not significantly more effective in…