A joint French-Australian research team including a Korean scientist claims it has successfully demonstrated in operation a theory put forward by physicist Erwin Schrödinger regarded as one of the biggest mysteries in quantum mechanics.

University of Queensland research fellow Doctor Hyunsuk Jeong and University of Paris-South Professor Philippe Grangier said Thursday that in a global first, they have created and measured a "quantum superposition" using a laser in which two light particles can, as they put it, "tell each other apart."

Quantum superposition is the notion that while we don't know the state of any object, the object may be in all possible states at once. But, as Schrödinger suggested with his famous cat analogy, the intrusion of the observer makes it so that the object is limited to a single state.

The team's discovery is seen as scientific feat that could yield applications in future quantum information technologies such as quantum codes, quantum computers and dimensional space travel.

The study was published in Nature magazine.