Published in Physics World, 4 Jun 2012
An international team of physicists has proposed a new device that could detect the presence of waves or particles while barely disturbing them. Called a “Schrödinger’s hat”, the device has not yet been built in the lab but the team believes that it could someday be used as a new type of sensor for quantum-information systems.
In the microscopic world of quantum mechanics, direct observation of the property of a particle – the position of an electron, for example – causes the collapse of the particle’s wavefunction. The result is that the particle that you set out to measure has been changed in a significant way. […]
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