Magnons are tiny waves of magnetization that move through solid magnetic materials, similar to ripples spreading across water after a stone falls in. Unlike photons, which can move through empty space or optical fibers, magnons travel inside magnetic solids.
Their wavelengths can shrink to the nanometer scale, which means magnonic circuits could, in theory, fit onto chips as small as those used in modern smartphones. Because magnons are excitations within a solid, they can naturally interact with many other fundamental quasiparticles, including phonons and photons, making them promising components for hybrid quantum systems and quantum metrology.
The main limitation has been their extremely short lifetime. Until now, magnons could reliably carry quantum information for only a few hundred nanoseconds at best, which is far too brief for practical quantum computing.
The team led by Wiener has now reported a major advance, measuring magnon lifetimes of up to 18 microseconds, almost one hundred times longer than any previous observation, paving the way for a quantum computer the size of a 1-cent coin. At that scale, magnons stop behaving like short-lived signals and begin to resemble dependable carriers of quantum information, comparable to the superconducting qubits used in today’s leading quantum processors. The findings were recently published in the journal Science Advances.
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