8 ms·

Giant Molecules Exist in Two Places at Once in Quantum Experiment

94 points by jonbaer 7y ago

Altheasy 7y ago
The scientist who find the point where super position stops will get the Nobel price for sure, I could give you a hint, it is less than my cat, I'm sure it never been in two places at once (Schrödinger is right about his cat too)
- nabla9 7y ago
  Superposition is not stopping as far as we know it. Cat typically weighs 3,6 – 4,5 kg. De Broglie Wavelength of 4 kg cat moving 1×10^-10 m/s is 1.7×10^14 m. You cat is in many places at once, those places are just very close to each other.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    That exponent for the wavelength is wrong. It should be more like 1.6x10^-33m. At least it should be negative.
    - nabla9 7y ago
      Yes. it should be 1.7×10^-14 m.
  - bobm_db 7y ago
    Something I don't quite understand about quantum mechanics and the MWI... At the point the atom passes through the diffraction grating, it has a quantum superposition. According to MWI, reality has "branched", right? Then the two realities interfere with each other to form the probabilistic pattern at the detector. So, according to MWI, reality has "merged" again? If we accept the mulitiverse idea of MWI, doesn't that mean at some point particles aren't able to marge with their branched-reality versions?
    - evanb 7y ago
      The "at some point" doesn't have to do with time. It has to do with the rest of the wavefunction of the universe. If the atom becomes entangled with everything else (in fact, a single quantum-mechanical spin suffices) the two branches become orthogonal and the interference terms from 'merging' vanish. We say the wavefunction 'decohered' when it becomes too complicated to see how to reverse this effect---as more and more particles get involved it becomes hopeless.
- ohduran 7y ago
  Superposition doesn't stop, or that at least is what I understand. The uncertainty principle can be expressed in terms of increments of energy and increments of time: the farer I could be from where I am supposed to be, so to say (that is the energy increment) is inversely proportional to the time that can be measured (that is the time increment). However, given that I'm no expert on the topic, I wish someone in a better position could elaborate on this idea.
- dsamarin 7y ago
  Or maybe the odds of your cat being in two places at once is miniscule and is less and less likely the more lasagna he or she eats.
  - jayalpha 7y ago
    Or your cat is always in all places but your experience only one. At least that one of you.
    - tyfon 7y ago
      In any case, the cat is the boss in all instances. My cat is very disappointed in me right now that I can't stop the onset of winter and demonstrates it very effectively! There is probably some space-time position where he is completely content but I think that's rarer than seeing him in two places at once.
      - BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
        I'm off shooting cats through two slits I made in my living room wall now, to prove or disprove you. For Science!
        ArchieLeach 7y ago
        The result of which is more Jackson Pollock than interference pattern...
        DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
        Always wondered about the backstory for Bill the Cat.
        Angostura 7y ago
        Ackk!
        rootw0rm 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- foobar1962 7y ago
  > it is less than my cat... Wouldn't it be ironic if decades of misdirected science could have been avoided if Schrodinger put his hamster in the box.
- mattkevan 7y ago
  Our cat is often in many places at once. He's able to remain in superposition between the garden, the sofa and our bed until I open the fridge, whereupon his wave-function collapses and he's instantly in the kitchen without moving through the intervening space.
- pontifier 7y ago
  My guess is that if the object can record for itself which slit it went through, the effect would stop.
  - lawlessone 7y ago
    could it be down to the speed of light and distance between both apparent positions of the particle?
mirimir 7y ago
Damn, it wasn't so easy to find the article, because TFA doesn't explicitly provide author names, even. But the link in the image title led to Fein et al. (2019).[0] So what I'm curious about is how far apart those "Two Places at Once" are. And if I'm understanding Fig. 2 correctly, it's large. That is ... > Fig. 2 | interference data. a, Counts as a function of the transverse position of the third grating with a sine-fit (solid black line) yielding a visibility of 25 ± 3%. The optical grating power was 1.2 W for this single scan. Counts are dark-rate-corrected and normalized to the control measurements. ... with peaks at ~200 nm, ~430 nm, ~680 nm and ~900 nm. But a 25 kDa molecule is only ~4 nm in diameter.[1] That's amazing! 0) https://sci-hub.tw/http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0663-9 https://sci-hub.tw/http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0663... 1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3055910/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3055910/
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Thank you! Rant: Not linking to the source article is a crime conmited by many outlets trying to report on science. I do not understand that practice. It is even worse when the researcher's institution does this in a public press release (MIT is consistently guilty of this). Are these people afraid that their watered down "explanations" are so wromg that even a cursory glance over the paper will show this? Some news sites such as Ars Technica provide the links. They even have agreements with major publishers that allow them to bypass paywalls and provide their readers with links to the the published full text as well.
  - benologist 7y ago
    There's a dated document that leaked at the start of the decade called The AOL Way that sheds a lot of light on these tactics - https://www.slideshare.net/cartercole/the-aol-way-leaked-plan https://www.slideshare.net/cartercole/the-aol-way-leaked-pla... External links are used for SEO and generally reserved for partner-websites or their own properties to recirculate traffic. Here we have an article reposted from space.com to scientificamerican.com that only links to nature.com and livescience.com. Future US owns space.com + livescience.com, and Springer Nature owns scientificamerican.com + nature.com.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Stay_frostJebel 7y ago
Finally they can get started on quantum superposition human teleporters. I want to see Neptune but I want to be home by dinner.
- ggggtez 7y ago
  The process being discussed is not really compatible with being alive.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Here it is: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/neptune/overview/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/neptune/overview/
im3w1l 7y ago
> That’s big enough that the researchers had to account for factors like gravity and the rotation of the Earth in designing the beam emitter Will this provide us with insight into how gravity and the quantum world relate?
- ojnabieoot 7y ago
  I have not read the paper, am not an expert, and can't judge with 100% reliability - but my understanding is no, I don't think an experiment of this type will necessarily provide the insight into a quantum nature of gravity. The effects described here are purely Newtonian - in particular, the earth's rotation and gravity are the same "kind" of impact, just an F=ma force which deflects the beam of molecules in the same manner that gravity deflects a stream of water out of a garden hose or the earth's rotation deflects a Foucault pendulum. In general I think I quantum gravitation experiments would require very low-mass particles in a very high-mass gravitational well: high-mass particles on Earth will be dominated by Newtonian gravity and quantum effects will be extremely difficult to detect. The relation this does give insight on is between Newtonian and quantum physics - the fuzzy boundary between determism and randomness - which is itself interesting, but also better understood. Perhaps a more precise measurement may reveal that the gravitational deflection is significantly more/less than expected from classical gravitation in a way that can only be explained with a new quantum theory, but that is quite speculative and almost certainly not supported by the evidence in this particular experiment.
freecodyx 7y ago
i feel like my brain is too abstract to accept the idea of something can be at multiple places at once, feels like a chess game, in which every possible move is already known, you only chose one at a time, and thus you decrease the possibilities toward your goal, and there is no go back.
- ozmodiar 7y ago
  I have trouble with this especially since I’m not sure if the language they’re using is just creating a misunderstanding. My example is quantum entanglement, which judging from a lot of sci-fi, people think means you literally have the same particle in two places, and changing it in one place changes it instantly in the other. Really it just breaks entanglement and you now have two different particles (so you can’t use it for FTL communication, hear that sci-fi authors?). It took me awhile to understand that, and I’m sure I have similar misunderstandings about this.
hi41 7y ago
Since the molecule of 2000 atoms exists in two places, it doubles the mass. Doesn’t this break the law of conservation of mass and energy. Can someone please explain how this is possible.
- gewa 7y ago
  From a quantummechanic standpoint its wrong to say, that its at two places at once. I really dont like the Headline. Superposition means, that it didnt decide for one of the two possible states, and so these both exist in superposition.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Can you say it’s moving between two places with an infinite frequency?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - chousuke 7y ago
      My own understanding of QM at this point is that it's sort of wrong to think of anything being exactly anywhere, ever. The way I intuit it, QM systems seem to be described by their wavefunctions sort of the same way a bunch of sine waves together makes music. You could have a QM system that is spatially (mostly) at X, represented by a wave function, or at Y, represented by another, but the third option, a superposition, is the combination of those two wave functions.
    - gewa 7y ago
      No not really, only when you observe the particle, the location is determined. ANd at this point it behaves like a localised single particle.
- pmontra 7y ago
  As long as we know how the universe works it's perfectly possible that the molecule is steady and all those places go to visit it at once. Recursively apply to its components. When we'll really know how it works we'll be able to do wonders.
toxicFork 7y ago
Please correct me where I am wrong, I have only studied quantum physics as a hobby. I dislike this description of things existing in two places at once, this is because I believe that objects exist in one place, then they move to the next place. The interference pattern only highlights the probability of where the particle will be when it's next observed, or "where it moved to". The object does not interfere with itself, it's the probability wave that is interfering with itself, and the wave is something separate from the object but is related to it. The particle does not exist anywhere between its current position and the next. It does not travel in a "linear" or other way, if at time t it was at position 0 and at time tNext it was at position 1, at time tNext*0.5 you cannot assume it was at position 0.5, or both "position 0.5, slightly higher up" and "position 0.5, slightly lower down" at the same time. In another way, in my mind, the object exists here, then it exists there, but it did not exist at the time between here and there, unless you happened to have observed it. Then of course "there" would be where you have made the observation because you have given it something to interact with. I guess my issue is, at what moment does the article say that it exists in two places at once? Are they inferring this from the fact that there is an interference pattern? To quote: "[1] Every particle or group of particles in the universe is also a wave—even large particles, even bacteria, even human beings, even planets and stars. [2] And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. [3] So any chunk of matter can also occupy two places at once." I guess my problem is with [1] "is also a wave". I think that "there is a wave related to the object" but not "the object IS a wave". Then [3] does not follow.
- toxicFork 7y ago
  To go further, I have a colleague who says there are actually no particles, only waves interacting with other waves. I am trying to get him to make a proper thesis out of this but he is busy trying to earn money to support his family. If there are any theories about this, please link them in the thread! It sort of resonates with what Richard Feynman has been demonstrating in some of his lectures but I have not been able to find the right keywords to search the internet, or the best way to ask scientists. Problems of hobby scientists...
  - xcodevn 7y ago
aazaa 7y ago
The original paper, fortunately linked in the article, is quite readable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0663-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0663-9 I was expecting it to discuss the largest species previously shown to demonstrate an interference pattern, but unfortunately there was none. Other points of note: Regarding the choice of molecule, and specifically fluorination: > An intense neutral beam of intact molecules is a prerequisite for our experiments, but soft neutral volatilization and post-ionization of complex molecules is an outstanding technical challenge. While matrix-assisted laser desorption and electrospray ionization are useful tools for molecular analysis, the charged beams they pro- duce are incompatible with the stringent dephasing requirements of interferometry. Continuous effusive thermal beams, on the other hand, suffer from thermal fragmentation for masses beyond a few kilodaltons. This can be overcome via fluoroalkyl-functionalization of the molecules, which adds mass, reduces the polarizability-to- mass ratio and increases volatility The group sees another factor of 10 increase in the ability to measure interference: > With advances in beam sources for biomolecules and metal clusters26,27, techniques to cool the particles below 80K (refs.28,29), and refined grating26 and imaging technologies30, our experiment is scalable and will push matter-wave interference and macroscopicity tests by another order of magnitude24 The Coriolis effect was corrected at least in part mechanically rather than purely computationally: > Compensation of the Coriolis effect is critical to obtaining high-visibility interference fringes in LUMI. By tilting the gratings, we introduce a gravitational deflection that opposes the Coriolis shift ...
ycombonator 7y ago
Listen to this episode where Sean Carroll talks about Superposition of larger objects https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/52-many-quantum-worlds-sean-carroll/id1265002699?i=1000444468426 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/52-many-quantum-worlds...
mrfusion 7y ago
So could you have these two places be inside and outside a black holes event horizen?
- wcoenen 7y ago
  No. That would allow objects to gain energy by quantum tunneling, which (as far as I know) quantum mechanics doesn't allow.
rafaelvasco 7y ago
Soon, things that are today considered fantasy and disregarded as mysticism will become science facts, just as electricity and magnetism were alien things a century ago. In the end we will realize that every myth comes from a true source. Everything can be made to be, once you put enough energy to make it manifested; I have absolutely no doubt in my mind about this, since I've seen and read things that are well beyond from what is common knowledge;
Ceezy 7y ago
It s a PROBABILITY of being at the same position and not a position per say.
scotty79 7y ago
> Because physicists already knew that electrons had mass and were definitely particles ... I think that evidence for existance of particles is pretty old and should be reconsidered. I think we 8should more carefully treat the data that convinced physicists that matter is particles, before they knew matter is a wave. Maybe it's counter productive to percieve matter as made of particles with particle qualities (what are those? pointlike, with specific (even if unmeasurable) momentum, position energy). Maybe momentum, position and energy is not something 'particles' have all the time. Maybe it's just something they manifest only while interacting.

94 points by jonbaer 7y ago

The scientist who find the point where super position stops will get the Nobel price for sure, I could give you a hint, it is less than my cat, I'm sure it never been in two places at once (Schrödinger is right about his cat too)

nabla9 7y ago
Superposition is not stopping as far as we know it. Cat typically weighs 3,6 – 4,5 kg. De Broglie Wavelength of 4 kg cat moving 1×10^-10 m/s is 1.7×10^14 m. You cat is in many places at once, those places are just very close to each other.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  That exponent for the wavelength is wrong. It should be more like 1.6x10^-33m. At least it should be negative.
  - nabla9 7y ago
    Yes. it should be 1.7×10^-14 m.
- bobm_db 7y ago
  Something I don't quite understand about quantum mechanics and the MWI... At the point the atom passes through the diffraction grating, it has a quantum superposition. According to MWI, reality has "branched", right? Then the two realities interfere with each other to form the probabilistic pattern at the detector. So, according to MWI, reality has "merged" again? If we accept the mulitiverse idea of MWI, doesn't that mean at some point particles aren't able to marge with their branched-reality versions?
  - evanb 7y ago
    The "at some point" doesn't have to do with time. It has to do with the rest of the wavefunction of the universe. If the atom becomes entangled with everything else (in fact, a single quantum-mechanical spin suffices) the two branches become orthogonal and the interference terms from 'merging' vanish. We say the wavefunction 'decohered' when it becomes too complicated to see how to reverse this effect---as more and more particles get involved it becomes hopeless.
ohduran 7y ago
Superposition doesn't stop, or that at least is what I understand. The uncertainty principle can be expressed in terms of increments of energy and increments of time: the farer I could be from where I am supposed to be, so to say (that is the energy increment) is inversely proportional to the time that can be measured (that is the time increment). However, given that I'm no expert on the topic, I wish someone in a better position could elaborate on this idea.
dsamarin 7y ago
Or maybe the odds of your cat being in two places at once is miniscule and is less and less likely the more lasagna he or she eats.
- jayalpha 7y ago
  Or your cat is always in all places but your experience only one. At least that one of you.
  - tyfon 7y ago
    In any case, the cat is the boss in all instances. My cat is very disappointed in me right now that I can't stop the onset of winter and demonstrates it very effectively! There is probably some space-time position where he is completely content but I think that's rarer than seeing him in two places at once.
    - BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
      I'm off shooting cats through two slits I made in my living room wall now, to prove or disprove you. For Science!
      - ArchieLeach 7y ago
        The result of which is more Jackson Pollock than interference pattern...
      - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
        Always wondered about the backstory for Bill the Cat.
        Angostura 7y ago
        Ackk!
        rootw0rm 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
foobar1962 7y ago
> it is less than my cat... Wouldn't it be ironic if decades of misdirected science could have been avoided if Schrodinger put his hamster in the box.
mattkevan 7y ago
Our cat is often in many places at once. He's able to remain in superposition between the garden, the sofa and our bed until I open the fridge, whereupon his wave-function collapses and he's instantly in the kitchen without moving through the intervening space.
pontifier 7y ago
My guess is that if the object can record for itself which slit it went through, the effect would stop.
- lawlessone 7y ago
  could it be down to the speed of light and distance between both apparent positions of the particle?

mirimir 7y ago

Damn, it wasn't so easy to find the article, because TFA doesn't explicitly provide author names, even. But the link in the image title led to Fein et al. (2019).[0] So what I'm curious about is how far apart those "Two Places at Once" are. And if I'm understanding Fig. 2 correctly, it's large. That is ... > Fig. 2 | interference data. a, Counts as a function of the transverse position of the third grating with a sine-fit (solid black line) yielding a visibility of 25 ± 3%. The optical grating power was 1.2 W for this single scan. Counts are dark-rate-corrected and normalized to the control measurements. ... with peaks at ~200 nm, ~430 nm, ~680 nm and ~900 nm. But a 25 kDa molecule is only ~4 nm in diameter.[1] That's amazing! 0) https://sci-hub.tw/http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0663-9 https://sci-hub.tw/http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0663... 1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3055910/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3055910/

gmueckl 7y ago
Thank you! Rant: Not linking to the source article is a crime conmited by many outlets trying to report on science. I do not understand that practice. It is even worse when the researcher's institution does this in a public press release (MIT is consistently guilty of this). Are these people afraid that their watered down "explanations" are so wromg that even a cursory glance over the paper will show this? Some news sites such as Ars Technica provide the links. They even have agreements with major publishers that allow them to bypass paywalls and provide their readers with links to the the published full text as well.
- benologist 7y ago
  There's a dated document that leaked at the start of the decade called The AOL Way that sheds a lot of light on these tactics - https://www.slideshare.net/cartercole/the-aol-way-leaked-plan https://www.slideshare.net/cartercole/the-aol-way-leaked-pla... External links are used for SEO and generally reserved for partner-websites or their own properties to recirculate traffic. Here we have an article reposted from space.com to scientificamerican.com that only links to nature.com and livescience.com. Future US owns space.com + livescience.com, and Springer Nature owns scientificamerican.com + nature.com.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Stay_frostJebel 7y ago

Finally they can get started on quantum superposition human teleporters. I want to see Neptune but I want to be home by dinner.

ggggtez 7y ago
The process being discussed is not really compatible with being alive.
Koshkin 7y ago
Here it is: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/neptune/overview/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/neptune/overview/

im3w1l 7y ago

> That’s big enough that the researchers had to account for factors like gravity and the rotation of the Earth in designing the beam emitter Will this provide us with insight into how gravity and the quantum world relate?

ojnabieoot 7y ago
I have not read the paper, am not an expert, and can't judge with 100% reliability - but my understanding is no, I don't think an experiment of this type will necessarily provide the insight into a quantum nature of gravity. The effects described here are purely Newtonian - in particular, the earth's rotation and gravity are the same "kind" of impact, just an F=ma force which deflects the beam of molecules in the same manner that gravity deflects a stream of water out of a garden hose or the earth's rotation deflects a Foucault pendulum. In general I think I quantum gravitation experiments would require very low-mass particles in a very high-mass gravitational well: high-mass particles on Earth will be dominated by Newtonian gravity and quantum effects will be extremely difficult to detect. The relation this does give insight on is between Newtonian and quantum physics - the fuzzy boundary between determism and randomness - which is itself interesting, but also better understood. Perhaps a more precise measurement may reveal that the gravitational deflection is significantly more/less than expected from classical gravitation in a way that can only be explained with a new quantum theory, but that is quite speculative and almost certainly not supported by the evidence in this particular experiment.

freecodyx 7y ago

i feel like my brain is too abstract to accept the idea of something can be at multiple places at once, feels like a chess game, in which every possible move is already known, you only chose one at a time, and thus you decrease the possibilities toward your goal, and there is no go back.

ozmodiar 7y ago
I have trouble with this especially since I’m not sure if the language they’re using is just creating a misunderstanding. My example is quantum entanglement, which judging from a lot of sci-fi, people think means you literally have the same particle in two places, and changing it in one place changes it instantly in the other. Really it just breaks entanglement and you now have two different particles (so you can’t use it for FTL communication, hear that sci-fi authors?). It took me awhile to understand that, and I’m sure I have similar misunderstandings about this.

hi41 7y ago

Since the molecule of 2000 atoms exists in two places, it doubles the mass. Doesn’t this break the law of conservation of mass and energy. Can someone please explain how this is possible.

gewa 7y ago
From a quantummechanic standpoint its wrong to say, that its at two places at once. I really dont like the Headline. Superposition means, that it didnt decide for one of the two possible states, and so these both exist in superposition.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Can you say it’s moving between two places with an infinite frequency?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - chousuke 7y ago
    My own understanding of QM at this point is that it's sort of wrong to think of anything being exactly anywhere, ever. The way I intuit it, QM systems seem to be described by their wavefunctions sort of the same way a bunch of sine waves together makes music. You could have a QM system that is spatially (mostly) at X, represented by a wave function, or at Y, represented by another, but the third option, a superposition, is the combination of those two wave functions.
  - gewa 7y ago
    No not really, only when you observe the particle, the location is determined. ANd at this point it behaves like a localised single particle.
pmontra 7y ago
As long as we know how the universe works it's perfectly possible that the molecule is steady and all those places go to visit it at once. Recursively apply to its components. When we'll really know how it works we'll be able to do wonders.

toxicFork 7y ago

Please correct me where I am wrong, I have only studied quantum physics as a hobby. I dislike this description of things existing in two places at once, this is because I believe that objects exist in one place, then they move to the next place. The interference pattern only highlights the probability of where the particle will be when it's next observed, or "where it moved to". The object does not interfere with itself, it's the probability wave that is interfering with itself, and the wave is something separate from the object but is related to it. The particle does not exist anywhere between its current position and the next. It does not travel in a "linear" or other way, if at time t it was at position 0 and at time tNext it was at position 1, at time tNext*0.5 you cannot assume it was at position 0.5, or both "position 0.5, slightly higher up" and "position 0.5, slightly lower down" at the same time. In another way, in my mind, the object exists here, then it exists there, but it did not exist at the time between here and there, unless you happened to have observed it. Then of course "there" would be where you have made the observation because you have given it something to interact with. I guess my issue is, at what moment does the article say that it exists in two places at once? Are they inferring this from the fact that there is an interference pattern? To quote: "[1] Every particle or group of particles in the universe is also a wave—even large particles, even bacteria, even human beings, even planets and stars. [2] And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. [3] So any chunk of matter can also occupy two places at once." I guess my problem is with [1] "is also a wave". I think that "there is a wave related to the object" but not "the object IS a wave". Then [3] does not follow.

toxicFork 7y ago
To go further, I have a colleague who says there are actually no particles, only waves interacting with other waves. I am trying to get him to make a proper thesis out of this but he is busy trying to earn money to support his family. If there are any theories about this, please link them in the thread! It sort of resonates with what Richard Feynman has been demonstrating in some of his lectures but I have not been able to find the right keywords to search the internet, or the best way to ask scientists. Problems of hobby scientists...
- xcodevn 7y ago

aazaa 7y ago

The original paper, fortunately linked in the article, is quite readable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0663-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0663-9 I was expecting it to discuss the largest species previously shown to demonstrate an interference pattern, but unfortunately there was none. Other points of note: Regarding the choice of molecule, and specifically fluorination: > An intense neutral beam of intact molecules is a prerequisite for our experiments, but soft neutral volatilization and post-ionization of complex molecules is an outstanding technical challenge. While matrix-assisted laser desorption and electrospray ionization are useful tools for molecular analysis, the charged beams they pro- duce are incompatible with the stringent dephasing requirements of interferometry. Continuous effusive thermal beams, on the other hand, suffer from thermal fragmentation for masses beyond a few kilodaltons. This can be overcome via fluoroalkyl-functionalization of the molecules, which adds mass, reduces the polarizability-to- mass ratio and increases volatility The group sees another factor of 10 increase in the ability to measure interference: > With advances in beam sources for biomolecules and metal clusters26,27, techniques to cool the particles below 80K (refs.28,29), and refined grating26 and imaging technologies30, our experiment is scalable and will push matter-wave interference and macroscopicity tests by another order of magnitude24 The Coriolis effect was corrected at least in part mechanically rather than purely computationally: > Compensation of the Coriolis effect is critical to obtaining high-visibility interference fringes in LUMI. By tilting the gratings, we introduce a gravitational deflection that opposes the Coriolis shift ...

ycombonator 7y ago

Listen to this episode where Sean Carroll talks about Superposition of larger objects https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/52-many-quantum-worlds-sean-carroll/id1265002699?i=1000444468426 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/52-many-quantum-worlds...

mrfusion 7y ago

So could you have these two places be inside and outside a black holes event horizen?

wcoenen 7y ago
No. That would allow objects to gain energy by quantum tunneling, which (as far as I know) quantum mechanics doesn't allow.

rafaelvasco 7y ago

Soon, things that are today considered fantasy and disregarded as mysticism will become science facts, just as electricity and magnetism were alien things a century ago. In the end we will realize that every myth comes from a true source. Everything can be made to be, once you put enough energy to make it manifested; I have absolutely no doubt in my mind about this, since I've seen and read things that are well beyond from what is common knowledge;

Ceezy 7y ago

It s a PROBABILITY of being at the same position and not a position per say.

scotty79 7y ago

> Because physicists already knew that electrons had mass and were definitely particles ... I think that evidence for existance of particles is pretty old and should be reconsidered. I think we 8should more carefully treat the data that convinced physicists that matter is particles, before they knew matter is a wave. Maybe it's counter productive to percieve matter as made of particles with particle qualities (what are those? pointlike, with specific (even if unmeasurable) momentum, position energy). Maybe momentum, position and energy is not something 'particles' have all the time. Maybe it's just something they manifest only while interacting.