Scientists from China and the United States have proposed an experiment that, according to them, allows bacteria to be turned into a real analogue of Schrödinger's cat and teleportation of information about their internal state.
Chinese and American physicists claim that they have created a scheme that allows you to "teleport" a quantum state and center of mass and thus swap two bacteria, according to an article published in the journal Science Bulletin.
“We have developed a simple and direct method for making one microbe at two different points at once, and created a method for teleporting the quantum state of this microorganism. I hope that our unconventional work will inspire other physicists to become more serious about quantum teleportation at the microbial level and the possibilities for its future applications,”said Tongcang Li of Purdue University in West Lafayette, USA.
Li and his colleague Zhang-Qi Yin from Tsinghua University in Beijing (China) invented and implemented in practice a technique that allows you to teleport a bacterium and turn it into a kind of analogue of the famous Schrödinger's cat, using several pieces of superconductors, magnetic fields and microwave emitters.
Such a "teleportator" is designed quite simply - each of its "inputs" is a superconductor plate, an oscillator connected to it, as well as a superconducting aluminum membrane hovering over the plate. The oscillator, as the scientists explain, is a microwave generator.
It is necessary to "entangle" a microbe with the quantum state of another bacterium on the second membrane, as well as to transform one microorganism into a microscopic Schrödinger's cat, forcing it to be located at two points on the membrane surface at once. In both cases, the quantum state of the microbe is "written" into the electron spin inside glycine - one of the simplest amino acid molecules on the surface of the bacterial shell.
Using a special magnetic needle, you can either "see" Schrödinger's cat, causing the collapse of the wave function and determining the position of the bacterium on the membrane, or teleport the "memory" of the microbe in the form of where its center of mass is, teleporting information about it from one bacterium to another using entangled electrons in glycine molecules on their shell.
In the near future, Yin and Li will try to carry out similar experiments with chlorococcus, a bacteria capable of photosynthesis. Scientists hope that such an experiment will help them understand whether plants are using the secrets of quantum mechanics in photosynthesis or not.
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