Clock analogy image to explain experimental approach (IMAGE)
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By sacrificing our knowledge about the 'coarse information' our quantum experiment can focus on the finer information, circumventing, but not breaching, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
The researchers use the analogy of a clock. Think of a normal clock with two hands: the hour hand and the minute hand. Now imagine the clock only has one hand. If it’s the hour hand, you can tell what hour it is and roughly what minute, but the minute reading will be very imprecise. If the clock only has the minute hand, you can read the minutes very precisely, but you lose track of the larger context – specifically, which hour you’re in. This ‘modular’ measurement sacrifices some global information in exchange for much finer detail.
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The University of Sydney
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