Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and their collaborators used lasers and neutrons to observe a long-lived quantum state in a magnetic material, opening a new way to study materials systems driven far from their equilibrium. Manipulation of quantum magnets is important for advancing quantum information science and could reduce loss of transported information, improve memory devices and benefit other quantum technologies.
The team studied magnons, quantum quasiparticles whose wavelike excitations are critical to magnetic behavior in materials. Magnons can carry information, and quantum magnets can support long lifetimes and memory for data transfer.
The team's findings, published in Nature Communications, show how a laser can push a magnetic system out of its normal state, how neutrons can reveal the details of that state and how the new state can persist at low energy instead of transiently fading away.
Important. Biological systems are far from equilibrium.
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