robinclarke

[robinclarke]

Schrödinger’s Tardigrade Claims Quantum-entangled

To entangle a life-form you have to put it in an extreme vacuum and cool it nearly to absolute zero without killing it. Bacteria have been so entangled. Now a group of scientists say they’ve entangled a tardigrade, commonly called a water bear, a cute critter that’s just barely visible to the naked eye. A tardigrade is a good candidate for freezing down to zero in a near-total vacuum. It’s about as tough as an animalcule gets. Insult the thing and it goes dormant by curling up into a ball, called a tun, in a process known as cryptobiosis. Though some have argued that at least some metabolism must still go on, a tun is perhaps best characterized as a life that’s been put on hold.

The presence of two superconducting qubits beside the tardigrade strengthens the case for the existence of entanglement, because here it seems the creature is in superposition with one qubit that’s in the 0 state (sometimes abbreviated |0>) and also with the other qubit, which is in the 1 state (a.k.a. |1>).