Namely, state collapse, statistical results and repeatability–And, Chad at Uncertain principles summarises it for non-specialists and interprets its results:
It’s really an outstanding piece of work. The one thing that it would be nice to see that isn’t there is a demonstration that this is a real “collapse,” and not just a refinement of the measurement– some experiment to show that the initial state is really a superposition of many different numbers, and not a state with a definite number that just isn’t measured very accurately. I’m not quite sure how one would go about that, though.
Even without that, though, this is an extremely cool paper in quantum optics, offering a really cool way of watching the process of quantum measurement in action.
Chad’s exposition is wonderful too–take a look!
