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by markisus 775 days ago
The arxiv has more details. They sparsely populated a dense lattice with particles. Then they turned off the lattice, which allowed all the particles’ wave functions to evolve according to the Schrödinger equation. Then they turned the lattice back on, which constitutes a measurement and collapses the wave functions. Then they took statistics on how far and in which direction each particle traveled and compared those statistics to the ones implied by Schrödinger’s equation.
1 comments

So is this really just a different version of the double-slit experiment, building up a statistical measurement of the waveform by performing many discrete measurements?
In a way, although the double slit demonstrated self interference. In this experiment, I think the lattice is so sparsely populated that interference effects are negligible and particles move as free wave packets while the lattice is disabled.