A Schrodinger cat living in two boxes
Quantum cats here and there The story of Schrodinger's cat being hidden away in a box and being both dead and alive is often invoked to illustrate the how peculiar the quantum world can be. On a twist of the dead/alive behavior, Wang et al. now show that the cat can be in two separate locations at the same time. Constructing their cat from coherent microwave photons, they show that the state of the "electromagnetic cat" can be shared by two separated cavities. Going beyond common sense absurdities of the classical world, the ability to share quantum states in different locations could be a powerful resource for quantum information processing. Science, this issue p. 1087 A quantum cat can be both alive and dead and in two places at once. Quantum superpositions of distinct coherent states in a single mode harmonic oscillator, known as "cat states," have been an elegant demonstration of Schrodinger's famous cat paradox. Here, we realize a two mode cat state of electromagnetic fields in two microwave cavities bridged by a superconducting artificial atom, which can also be viewed as an entangled pair of single cavity cat states. We present full quantum state tomography of this complex cat state over a Hilbert space exceeding 100 dimensions via quantum nondemolition measurements of the joint photon number parity. The ability to manipulate such multicavity quantum states paves the way for logical operations between redundantly encoded qubits for fault tolerant quantum computation and communication.
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