Paper detail

Experimental undecidability of macroscopic quantumness

Quantum mechanics marks a radical departure from the classical understanding of Nature, fostering an inherent randomness which forbids a deterministic description; yet the most fundamental departure arises from something different. As shown by Bell [1] and Kochen-Specker [2], quantum mechanics portrays a picture of the world in which reality loses its objectivity and is in fact created by observation. Quantum mechanics predicts phenomena which cannot be explained by any theory with objective realism, although our everyday experience supports the hypothesis that macroscopic objects, despite being made of quantum particles, exist independently of the act of observation; in this paper we identify this behavior as classical. Here we show that this seemingly obvious classical behavior of the macroscopic world cannot be experimentally tested and belongs to the realm of ontology similar to the dispute on the interpretations of quantum mechanics [3,4]. For small systems such as a single photon [5] or a pair [6], it has been experimentally proven that a classical description cannot be sustained. Recently, there have also been experiments that claim to have demonstrated quantum behavior of relatively large objects such as interference of fullerenes [7], the violation of Leggett-Garg inequality in Josephson junction [8], and interference between two condensed clouds of atoms [9], which suggest that there is no limit to the size of the system on which the quantum-versus-classical question can be tested. These behaviors, however, are not sufficient to refute classical description in the sense of objective reality. Our findings show that once we reach the regime where an Avogadro number of particles is present, the quantum-versus-classical question cannot be answered experimentally.