Contradictions of QM Scaled Up to "Real" World

From: Barbara Lamar (shabrika@juno.com)
Date: Fri Oct 27 2000 - 09:55:47 MDT


http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999108

Scientists have recreated the weirdness of the quantum world on a
real-world scale. This macroscopic quantum object is a loop in which
current flows in opposite directions at the same time.

A group based at the State University of New York in Stony Brook made
similar observations in July. But Caspar van der Wal at the Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands says his observations are in
some ways a more striking example of a macroscopic object being in two
different quantum mechanical states at the same time.

Van der Wal, who leads the group, says his creation is a step towards the
goal of building circuitry for a quantum computer. "We've shown how to
control decoherence to some extent," he says.

Decoherence occurs in a quantum system when it is disturbed by noise,
leading to the loss of information carried in the system's wave function.



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