Memoirs of a qubit: Hybrid memory solves key problem for quantum...(the nucleus where it can survive for muc...)

The experiments were made possible by the use of silicon enriched with the single 28Si iso-tope, painstakingly grown by the Berkeley team into large crystals while keeping the material ultra-pure and free from contaminants.

The electron acts as a middle-man between the nucleus and the outside world. It gives us a way to have our cake and eat it - fast processing speeds from the electron, and long memory times from the nucleus, said John Morton, a research fellow at St. Johns College, Oxford and lead author of the Letter to Nature.

Crucially, the information stored in the nucleus had a lifetime of about 1 and 3/4 seconds, ex-ceeding a recently calculated target for quantum computing in silicon beyond which known error correction techniques could then protect the data for an arbitrarily long period of time. Without this technique the longest researchers had been able to preserve quantum information in silicon was a few tens of milliseconds.

Nobody really knew how long a nucleus might hold quantum information in this system. With the crystals from Lawrence Berkeley and very careful measurements we were delighted to see memory times exceeding the threshold, said Steve Lyon, leader of the Princeton team.

Many different approaches to building a quantum computer are being studied, however one great advantage of the model used here is that it is based on silicon technology, which makes it more compatible with todays computers.

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