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A ghostly portrait of Schrödinger's cat has revealed one of physics' most bizarre theories: quantum entanglement.

Incredibly, the image was created using light that never interacted with the stencil, while the photons that hit the stencil were not seen by the camera.

The experiment could someday lead to the development of quantum imagers that can create detailed pictures of delicate biological samples, such as tissue.

A ghostly portrait of Schrödinger's cat has revealed one of physics' most bizarre theories: quantum entanglement.Incredibly, the image was created using light that never interacted with the stencil, while the photons that hit the stencil were not seen by the camera

Schrödinger's cat experiment asks: If you put a cat inside an opaque box and make his life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die?

When the random event occurs, or when you open the box?

Common sense may suggest the former, but quantum mechanics claims someone has to observe the result before the cat is dead.

That means the cat is in both states until you open the box and look at it, and only at that point does the state of the cat become certain.

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment created by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 (left). The latest experiment has allowed scientists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences have found a way to observe the cat without ever having to 'look' at it using photons of light (right)

The latest experiment has allowed scientists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences to find a way to observe the cat without ever having to look at it.

As part of the experiment, scientists created yellow and red pairs of entangled photons. Yellow photons were sent to the cat stencil, while red photons went to the camera.

As a result of entanglement, the red photons formed the image of the cat because they created a 'quantum link' with their yellow pairs.

This means that one photon has the potential to travel through the subject of a photo and then disappear.

However, the other goes to a detector but somehow still 'knows' about its twin's life and can be used to build up an image, according to Nature's Elizabeth Gibney.

The work, scientists say, might help physicists solve what they call the measurement problem.

This is the question of why quantum states take on certain values only when they are observed.

In this experiment, researchers measured the entangled state of a pair of photons using only one photon of the entangled pair.

They had previously only been able to see the entangled state when they had to measured both photons.

'What's most intriguing thing about this experiment is how information is contained in twin photons,' researcher Gabriela Lemos told Live Science.

'How, in an entangled state, [this information] can be accessed by one photon.'