2025/04/03 by James Tagg, Tagg, James, William M. Reid +1
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.02914
openalex publication_date 2025/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.