The very act of measurement seems to “collapse” the superposition. That’s a superposition.Īnd it gets weirder: Measuring which slit such a particle goes through will invariably indicate it goes through only one-but then the wavelike interference (the “quantumness,” if you will) vanishes.
The particle seems somehow to pass through both slits at once, interfering with itself. The odd thing, though, is this interference occurs even if only one particle is fired at a time. One fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics is that tiny particles can behave like waves, so that those passing through one slit “interfere” with those going through the other, their wavy ripples either boosting or canceling one another to create a characteristic pattern on a detector screen. The classic example of a superposition involves firing photons at two parallel slits in a barrier. And the researchers predict the answer will be even stranger and more shocking than “two places at once.”
Their experiment was designed to enable scientists to sneak a glance at where an object-in this case a particle of light, called a photon-actually resides when it is placed in a superposition. It is the central question in quantum mechanics, and no one knows the answer: What really happens in a superposition-the peculiar circumstance in which particles seem to be in two or more places or states at once? In 2018 a team of researchers in Israel and Japan proposed an experiment that could finally let us say something for sure about the nature of this puzzling phenomenon.
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