Marta Musso
In the world of quantum physics, another record appears to have just been broken. In a paper listed on the preprint site ArXiv, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China claim to have observed atoms in a state of quantum superposition for 23 minutes. Being able to keep quantum states stable for such a long time could help make quantum devices more durable and discover strange new effects in quantum physics, they argue.
Superposition is a phenomenon where an object at a given moment has the potential to occupy multiple different states, but the object’s actual state is unknown. Very small objects, such as photons or electrons, demonstrate this behavior; they behave like waves, potentially occupying a range of positions at any one time, rather than like particles with a singular position. Crucially, when an object in superposition is observed, its condition collapses and it’s seen in only one of its potential states. You can think of this like a coin being flipped—while spinning in the air, it is potentially both heads or tails at the same time, but when you look at it after it’s landed, it can be only one or the other.
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