By breaking the symmetry of their environment, scientists demonstrate a new technique for extending the length of time qubits can retain information.
Scientists have shown that by changing the surrounding crystal’s structure to be less symmetric, they may prolong the lifetime of a molecular qubit.
The qubit is protected from noise by the asymmetry, allowing it to preserve information five times longer than if it were housed in a symmetrical structure. The study team obtained a coherence time (the time the qubit maintains information) of 10 microseconds, or 10 millionths of a second, compared to a molecular qubit’s coherence time of 2 microseconds in a symmetrical crystal host.
The findings, which were published in the journal Physical Review X, were produced by a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy (DOE), Northwestern University, The University of Chicago, and the University of Glasgow. Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center run by Argonne, helped fund the research.
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