Physics News

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created "quantum cats" made of photons (particles of light), boosting prospects for manipulating light in new ways to enhance precision measurements as well as computing and communications based on quantum physics.The NIST experiments, described in a forthcoming paper, repeatedly produced light pulses that each possessed two exactly opposite properties?specifically, opposite phases, as if the peaks of the light waves were superimposed on the troughs. Physicists call this an optical Schr?ger's cat. NIST's quantum cat is the first to be made by detecting three photons at once and is one of the largest and most well-defined cat states ever made from light. (Larger cat states have been created in different systems by other research groups, including one at NIST.)A "cat state" is a curiosity of the quantum world, where particles can exist in "superpositions" of two opposite properties simultaneously. Cat