- #1
David Byrden
- 90
- 8
Given an ideal "box" as used by Schrodinger;
- have a quantum event occur inside it, e.g. sudden cat death with 50% probability.
- have a machine in it that sends out a qubit, fully entangled with the box' internal state, at regular intervals.
- the qubit is a polarised photon
- outside, use a filter to nudge the photon's polarisation a little, toward a desired angle
- Repeat many times, rotating your filter appropriately.
- By using enough measurements, and small enough angles, you can make the chance of photon absorption in the filter arbitrarily small.
If I understand QM, the measurement of a fully entangled qubit tells you the box' internal state.
Therefore, by choosing a basis for measurement, you are choosing the states that the box may take, when you make the measurement (it is a superposition, so really you are just adjusting the relative amounts of the superposed states in it)
So, you can take an initial superposition of fifty-fifty dead/alive cat, and nudge it with many such measurements into another superposition such as "cat almost certainly alive".
And then you can open the box and recover your cat.
Would this work? Why not? I'm especially interested in how to generate the photons such that the two superposed copies of the photon are coherent, although the two states inside the box will have decohered.
Thank you in advance.
David
- have a quantum event occur inside it, e.g. sudden cat death with 50% probability.
- have a machine in it that sends out a qubit, fully entangled with the box' internal state, at regular intervals.
- the qubit is a polarised photon
- outside, use a filter to nudge the photon's polarisation a little, toward a desired angle
- Repeat many times, rotating your filter appropriately.
- By using enough measurements, and small enough angles, you can make the chance of photon absorption in the filter arbitrarily small.
If I understand QM, the measurement of a fully entangled qubit tells you the box' internal state.
Therefore, by choosing a basis for measurement, you are choosing the states that the box may take, when you make the measurement (it is a superposition, so really you are just adjusting the relative amounts of the superposed states in it)
So, you can take an initial superposition of fifty-fifty dead/alive cat, and nudge it with many such measurements into another superposition such as "cat almost certainly alive".
And then you can open the box and recover your cat.
Would this work? Why not? I'm especially interested in how to generate the photons such that the two superposed copies of the photon are coherent, although the two states inside the box will have decohered.
Thank you in advance.
David
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