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Science 24 May 1996:
Vol. 272. no. 5265, pp. 1101 - 0
DOI: 10.1126/science.272.5265.1101
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Research News

Gary Taubes

Schrödinger's cat has always been an elusive beast, but physicists may have finally trapped one in the laboratory. In the great Austrian physicist's thought experiment, the fate of a cat was linked to the quantum indeterminacy of a radioactive atom--half decayed, half undecayed. The cat, as a result, was both alive and dead. Now physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, report in this issue (p. 1131) that they have created what one observer calls a "Schrödinger's kitten," in which they excite an atom into a superposition of quantum states, then ease those two states apart so that the atom appears to be in two distinct physical locations simultaneously.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)