Schrödinger cats in boxes: tests of quantum concepts at the quantum-classical boundary

by Serge Haroche (Collège de France, ENS, Paris)

Wednesday 29 Jun 2005, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

The metaphor of a cat suspended coherently between life and death was coined by Schrödinger in the 1930's in order to expose one of the paradoxes of the quantum, the non-existence of state superpositions at the macroscopic scale. It has now become possible to prepare and to study in the lab mesoscopic superpositions of states which bear a close similarity with Schrödinger's cat. I will review recent experiments performed on such states in Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics. Proposals to extend these studies to Schrödinger cat states delocalized in two cavities will be discussed. These new breeds of "cats" will combine the oddity of macroscopic superpositions with the strangeness of non-locality. New versions of Bell's inequality tests will probe the non-local behaviour of these cats and study their sensitivity to decoherence. The relevance of these studies to quantum information science will be briefly discussed.