Schrödinger’s Cat with 20 Qubits a New Record

(ScienceDaily) In the quantum world, particles illustrating the famous analogy of Schrödinger’s ‘dead or alive’ cat can be left-spinning or right-spinning. An international team, together with experts from Forschungszentrum Jülich, have now succeeded in transforming 20 entangled quantum bits into such a state of superposition. The generation of such atomic Schrödinger cat states is regarded as an important step in the development of quantum computers.
Experts from several of the world’s most renowned institutions joined forces to develop the experiment. In addition to the Jülich researchers, scientists from numerous top American universities — Harvard, Berkeley, MIT and Caltech — as well as the Italian University of Padua were involved.
For their experiment, the researchers used a programmable quantum simulator based on Rydberg atom arrays. In this approach, individual atoms, in this case rubidium atoms, are captured by laser beams and held in place side by side in a row. The technique is also known as optical tweezers.