Experimental Investigation of Decoherence
Bernard d’Espagnat. We will now have the pleasure of hearing a presentation on decoherence from Jean-Michel Raimond himself who—as we all know—is one of the principal authors of the pivotal experiment on this matter: the one that showed that, after his unfortunate predicament, the mesoscopic Schrodinger cat is indeed in a state of quantum superposition, “dead plus alive”, and that it is only after a very brief but measurable lperiod of time that it becomes, to our eyes, either dead or alive.
EDITOR—I agree with Treasure and MacRae that the greatest determinant of the power of a study is its design.1 Minimisation improves power by comparing similar groups but there is a similar technique—randomised block design—which has even more power.2 ::: ::: In …