Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Mon 14 Sep 2009 04:00 PM PDT
How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things
(Excerpted from an article on the MIT Technology Review website)
One of the great challenges for quantum physicists is to find quantum behaviour in macroscopic objects. There are obvious examples of quantum behaviour on a large scale, such as superconductivity and superfluidity, but physicists want more.
Having created quantum superpositions of photons, electrons, atoms and even molecules, one of the current obsessions is to create a quantum superposition of a living thing, such as a virus. The question is how to do this and whether it makes any sense to say these things are living at all.
This is an experiment that will be hard. But today
Oriol Romero-Isart from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Quantenoptik in
Germany and a few buddies suggest that it is achievable with current
technology and outline the challenges that will have to be tackled to pull it off.
The experiment will first involve storing a virus in a vacuum and then cooling it to its quantum mechanical ground state in a microcavity. Zapping the virus with a laser then leaves it in a superposition of the ground state and an excited one.
This works only if the virus behaves like a dielectric, can survive the vacuum and appears transparent to laser light, which would otherwise rip it apart.
As luck would have it, Romero-Isart and co say that several viruses fit the bill. The common flu virus is known to be able to survive in a vacuum, seems to have the required dielectric properties and may well be transparent to a careful choice of laser light. The tobacco mosaic virus, to all intents and purposes a dielectric rod, looks like another good candidate.
But does it make any sense to say that a large molecule in its ground state is somehow alive? It's difficult enough now to define what life means. Throw a quantum superposition into the mix and the biologists who ponder these problems are likely to implode. ... (Article continues at link below.)
This article is abstracted from the MIT Technology Review website: https://www.technologyreview.com/
The full article & online comments can be viewed at: https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24101/
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