The cat state in the UNSW study is an atom of antimony, which is a heavy atom with a large nuclear spin. The high spin value implies that, instead of just pointing up and down (that is, in one of two ...

To demonstrate this, quantum engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Melbourne University in Australia embedded an antimony atom into a silicon device to create a qubit.

The 'Schrödinger's cat' thought experiment illustrates a quantum superposition state, where a cat is simultaneously alive and dead, depending on the decay of a radioactive atom. Professor Andrea ...

The new method encodes quantum information onto an antimony atom, which has eight possible states that enable data to be more safely stored than in a standard two-state qubit, or quantum bit.

In a real-world experiment, Andrea Morello, a professor of Quantum Engineering at UNSW, used the atom of the heavy element of antimony as a qubit and the metaphorical Schrödinger’s cat.