| Title | "Quantum Cheshire Cat" Created | |
| Date | Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:46PM | |
| Author | LaminatorX | |
| Topic | ||
| from the Or-Was-It? dept. | ||
Scientists have created a "quantum Cheshire Cat" by separating a particle from one of its physical properties. Named after the cat in Alice in Wonderland that vanishes leaving only its grin, a beam of neutrons was used to separate them from their magnetic moment.
From Nature:
From its very beginning, quantum theory has been revealing extraordinary and counter-intuitive phenomena, such as wave-particle duality, Schroedinger cats and quantum non-locality. Another paradoxical phenomenon found within the framework of quantum mechanics is the 'quantum Cheshire Cat': if a quantum system is subject to a certain pre- and postselection, it can behave as if a particle and its property are spatially separated. It has been suggested to employ weak measurements in order to explore the Cheshire Cat's nature. Here we report an experiment in which we send neutrons through a perfect silicon crystal interferometer and perform weak measurements to probe the location of the particle and its magnetic moment. The experimental results suggest that the system behaves as if the neutrons go through one beam path, while their magnetic moment travels along the other.
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printed from SoylentNews, "Quantum Cheshire Cat" Created on 2024-04-18 23:42:47