Re:Is the Schrödinger Equation True?
by lmm on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @03:27AM
(#25743878)
> I get the impression that decoherence is treated as merely a problem for technicians working on experimental apparatus, or an engineering issue to be dealt with on the road to quantum computation. Are there any results on fundamental limits to the degree of entanglement in a system? We've been trying to get that damn cat into superposition for ~85 years now, with no luck.
We've been setting records for bigger and bigger superpositions every few years - apparently we're up to 2000 atoms now. There's no reason to suspect there's a fundamental limit, any more than there's a fundamental problem that prevents nuclear fusion from working. That doesn't mean the engineering isn't devilishly hard, maybe even impractical (if it gets literally exponentially harder to maintain more and more particles in superposition), but it's not a fundamental physics issue.
We've been setting records for bigger and bigger superpositions every few years - apparently we're up to 2000 atoms now. There's no reason to suspect there's a fundamental limit, any more than there's a fundamental problem that prevents nuclear fusion from working. That doesn't mean the engineering isn't devilishly hard, maybe even impractical (if it gets literally exponentially harder to maintain more and more particles in superposition), but it's not a fundamental physics issue.