Schrödinger’s Cat by Surlana
Record-breaking experiment shows that a cluster of thousands of atoms can behave like a wave and a particle at the same time.
The famous one, who is dead and alive at the same time, just gain a little weight.
A team of physicists from the University of Vienna created the biggest ‘overlap’ evera quantum state in which an object exists in a fog of likely locations at the same time.
The team placed individual clumps of about 7000 sodium atoms metallic, approximately 8 nanometers wide, in an overlap of different locations, spaced approximately 133 nanometers apart.
Instead of passing through the experimental setup as a particle, each cluster behaved like a wavespreading in an overlap of spatially distinct trajectorieswhich then interfered and formed a pattern that researchers were able to detect.
The experience was described in a publication in the magazine Nature this Wednesday. “It’s a fantastic result“, says physics Sandra Eibenberger-Ariasa researcher at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, who was not involved in the study.
Quantum theory does not impose a limit on size that an overlay can have, but theEveryday objects clearly do not behave in a quantum way, he explains.
This experience, that places such a massive object like a protein or a small viral particle in an overlap, is helping to answer the “big, almost philosophical question of ‘Is there a transition between quantum and classical?‘” says Eibenberger-Arias.
Experience demonstrates that, at least for clusters of this size, quantum mechanics remains valid, and it also has practical importancestates Giulia Rubinoquantum physicist at the University of Bristol, UK.
Os quantum computers will ultimately need to maintain perhaps millions of objects in a large quantum state to perform useful calculations. If nature forced systems to collapse at a certain point, and that scale was smaller than that needed to build a quantum computer, “then that would be problematic“, explains Rubino.
Physicists have long debated How does the classical worldI give daily, emerges from an underlying quantum world. Quantum theory “never states that it stops working above a certain mass or dimension”, says Sebastian Pedalino, physicist at the University of Vienna and first author of the study.
In 1935, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger showed the absurdity of common interpretations of quantum mechanics with his famous mental experiment based on a cat, which is trapped in a box containing a poison that has a 50% chance of killing it.
In this box, according to Schrödinger, the cat is, at the same time, alive and deaduntil someone opens the box and determine the state in which the animal is located, which exists as a wave function, with multiple possibilities, until it is observed. When it is observed, it becomes a defined object.
In the real worldobjects end up becoming too complex or interacting too much to maintain overlap, an idea known as decoherence.
But there are also some extensions of quantum mechanicsknown as “collapse theories“, which suggest that, beyond a certain point, a quantum system will inevitably reduce to a classical state, even in isolation.
In a study by Nature in 2025, these theories were chosen by 4% of researchers as their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics.
“Conventional quantum mechanics does not set any limits; it doesn’t say that it stops working from this mass or this size or this overlapping distance”, explains Pedalino to .
“We do not know whether there may be any fundamental limit or new physics that is linked to the mass or size of an object, is a question that we have to resolve through measurements and experiments”, he highlights
E the only way to answer this question is “increasing the scale of quantum experiments”, concludes Rubino. In other words… dramatically fattening Schrödinger’s Cat.
