Schrodinger's Cat Paradox Revisited: Transfer of Nonclassical Properties from Microscopic Superpositions to Macroscopic Thermal States

We investigate a more reasonable analogy of Schrodinger's cat paradox, where the state corresponding to the virtual cat is a mixed thermal state with a large average photon number. Several examples show that prominent quantum properties can be transferred from a microscopic superposition to a significantly mixed thermal state. Even when the temperature of the initial thermal state approaches infinity, quantum coherence between extremely mixed thermal states is produced with the maximum negativity of the Wigner functions and conspicuous interference patterns. Entanglement can also be produced under the same condition between extremely mixed thermal states with nearly the maximum Bell-inequality violation