Curator's Take
This article presents a fascinating experimental demonstration that challenges our classical intuitions about reality by showing that quantum measurements can violate "objective realism" - the idea that physical properties exist independently of observation. The researchers cleverly used weak measurements on IBM and IonQ quantum computers to test this fundamental principle without the artificial constraints of traditional approaches, achieving a statistically robust violation at 10 standard deviations. Beyond its profound implications for our understanding of quantum mechanics, this work also serves as an impressive validation of the quality of two-qubit gates on major quantum hardware platforms, showing that today's quantum computers are now precise enough to probe the deepest mysteries of quantum theory. The ability to conduct such fundamental physics experiments on publicly accessible quantum computers marks a remarkable milestone in making cutting-edge quantum research democratically available.
— Mark Eatherly
Summary
We demonstrate violation of objective realism in quantum world using unconstrained weak measurements. Instead of limited Leggett-Garg approach with artificial bounds on the observed values, we assume two identical and indepenent weak detectors and final conditioning. The experimental verification has been performed on public quantum computers, IBM and IonQ. Thanks to sufficiently large statistics, the violation is observed at the level of 10 standard deviations. The tests confirmed also high quality of parametric two-qubit gates offered by main quantum hardware providers.