Objective Reduction of the Wave Function Demonstrated on Superconducting Quantum Compute

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tagg, James, Reid, William
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tagg, James
Reid, William
author_facet Tagg, James
Reid, William
contents We describe an experiment using superconducting transmon qubits that demonstrates wavefunction collapse consistent with Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) - the theory of consciousness proposed by Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. The experiment performs a partial measurement on a qubit. It uses the result of that measurement to move an estimated 10e-12 kg of mass in one of two locations separated by approximately 1 mm. In standard quantum mechanics, the partial measurement leaves the system in an improper mixture, a state that appears probabilistic but retains quantum coherence. This is mathematically indistinguishable from a proper mixture, where the state has genuinely collapsed. According to Penrose's theory, improper mixtures can lead to gravitationally induced collapse. Results of our experiment show a change in the circuit evolution that is consistent with wavefunction collapse driven by such an improper mixture. The experiment is performed on an IBM Eagle 127-qubit processor using IBM's programming framework Qiskit.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_02914
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Objective Reduction of the Wave Function Demonstrated on Superconducting Quantum Compute
Tagg, James
Reid, William
Quantum Physics
Computational Physics
We describe an experiment using superconducting transmon qubits that demonstrates wavefunction collapse consistent with Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) - the theory of consciousness proposed by Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. The experiment performs a partial measurement on a qubit. It uses the result of that measurement to move an estimated 10e-12 kg of mass in one of two locations separated by approximately 1 mm. In standard quantum mechanics, the partial measurement leaves the system in an improper mixture, a state that appears probabilistic but retains quantum coherence. This is mathematically indistinguishable from a proper mixture, where the state has genuinely collapsed. According to Penrose's theory, improper mixtures can lead to gravitationally induced collapse. Results of our experiment show a change in the circuit evolution that is consistent with wavefunction collapse driven by such an improper mixture. The experiment is performed on an IBM Eagle 127-qubit processor using IBM's programming framework Qiskit.
title Objective Reduction of the Wave Function Demonstrated on Superconducting Quantum Compute
topic Quantum Physics
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02914