🐱 Oxford Physicists Just Made Schrödinger’s Cat Even Weirder

Schrödinger’s cat was never really about a cat. It was a way to show how strange quantum mechanics becomes when one object is treated as being in two states at once.

Now physicists at the University of Oxford have created a new family of “cat-like” quantum states — but with an extra twist: the two parts of the superposition are not ordinary, classical-looking wave packets. They are already deeply quantum objects.

In standard lab versions of Schrödinger-cat states, researchers usually combine coherent states — the closest thing quantum physics has to classical motion. The Oxford team went further. Using a single trapped strontium-88 ion, they built superpositions from squeezed, trisqueezed and quadsqueezed motional states: exotic states where quantum uncertainty is reshaped in unusual ways.

The setup is elegant. The ion’s internal electronic state acts like a qubit, while its motion behaves like a quantum harmonic oscillator — a system that can occupy many energy levels. By entangling these two parts and then performing a mid-circuit measurement, the team could “sculpt” the ion’s motion into highly programmable quantum superpositions.

Why is this interesting?

• The states are built from nonclassical components, not just classical-like wave packets
• Their size, orientation and separation can be tuned experimentally
• Wigner-function measurements showed interference and negativity — signatures of genuinely quantum behavior
• Some states displayed striking geometric patterns, including sixfold symmetry in a trisqueezed example
• At the same average energy, these states can be more “quantum-resourceful” than standard cat states or Fock states

This matters because future quantum computers may not rely only on simple qubits. Quantum oscillators can store information across many energy levels, opening a richer route toward bosonic quantum error correction — where information is encoded in oscillator states rather than many separate physical qubits.

It is still early-stage physics, not a ready-made quantum computer. But it gives researchers a new way to build, control and study quantum states that sit far beyond everyday intuition.

And it brings us back to the original question Schrödinger wanted to provoke:

Where does the quantum world end — and the classical world begin?

Source: https://doi.org/10.1103/k1xk-yt42

#QuantumPhysics #SchrodingersCat #QuantumComputing #Physics #Oxfordx #science

⏳ Scientists Found a Way to Make Quantum Time Look Like It Runs Backward

At our everyday scale, time has a clear direction. Eggs break, coffee cools, and no one has ever un-spilled a glass of water.

But at the quantum scale, the story is stranger. Many fundamental equations work just as well forward or backward in time. The arrow of time appears when a system is measured — because measurement randomly disturbs its state.

Now researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, NIST, and the University of Maryland have developed a theoretical control method that can reshape that arrow.

Their idea is based on a “control Hamiltonian” — a precisely designed sequence of fields and pulses that mimics and counteracts the random disturbance caused by quantum measurement. With the right feedback, the system’s trajectory can be made to look as if it is moving backward rather than forward.

To be clear: this is not a time machine.

No one reversed time for people, objects, or the universe. The work shows that, in a monitored quantum system, the appearance of time’s direction can be weakened, blurred, or even inverted.

The team also used the framework to design a quantum version of Maxwell’s demon — a measurement-powered engine that could, in principle, extract useful energy from the act of observation itself. That energy might one day help drive quantum processes or be stored in a quantum battery.

The caveat: this is still mostly a theoretical result. Experimental tests are planned for superconducting qubits, where fast feedback and quantum Maxwell’s demon setups are already technically plausible.

Why it matters: better control over quantum measurement could help with quantum state preparation, more stable quantum computers, and new ways to manage energy at the smallest scales.

The big takeaway: the arrow of time may feel absolute in daily life — but in the quantum world, it can become something engineers may learn to control.

📄 Original paper: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/l18s-9vmh
📖 Los Alamos summary: https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0319-reshaping-quantum-arrow
📖 ScienceDaily summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260625014802.htm

#QuantumPhysics #ArrowOfTime #QuantumComputing #Physics