Magnon lifetimes just got stretched 100x, penny sized quantum computers might actually happen

[TeaAndCode72]

A team at the University of Vienna led by Andrii Chumak managed to extend magnon lifetimes from a few hundred nanoseconds up to 18 microseconds, which is nearly a hundred times longer than anything previously recorded

Magnons are these tiny magnetic waves that ripple through solid materials, similar to how ripples spread across a pond, and unlike photons they can be confined to circuits as small as the chips inside your phone

The trick was combining two things, exciting short wavelength magnons that are naturally less sensitive to surface defects, and cooling ultra pure spheres of yttrium iron garnet down to 30 millikelvin

The genuinely exciting part of the paper is the discovery that the lifetime limit was never a fundamental law of physics, it was a materials purity problem the whole time, which means future improvements can come from better manufacturing rather than waiting on a new breakthrough discovery

At 18 microseconds magnons start approaching the performance of superconducting qubits used in today's leading quantum processors, and because they live inside solids rather than needing free space like photons, the dream of a quantum computer the size of a one cent coin suddenly looks less like science fiction

Tiny magnetic waves could unlock quantum computers the size of a pennywww.sciencedaily.com

[BrokenDave72]

Penny sized quantum computer is a great headline but let us be honest we are still talking about lab conditions at 30 millikelvin, that is nowhere near a consumer device yet

[LostReece55]

The bit that impressed me most is that it was a materials science fix rather than a new physical principle, that usually means the field can iterate faster from here

[ScarletWrench]

Magnons interacting naturally with phonons and photons could make them an useful bridge component in hybrid quantum systems, that versatility is underrated in the coverage

[Scarlet Annie]

18 microseconds still sounds tiny to a layperson like me, can someone explain why that number actually matters for computation

[Harbour]

This is exactly the kind of unglamorous materials engineering work that never gets headlines until it suddenly unlocks something huge

[Olivia78]

Vienna keeps quietly producing some of the most interesting fundamental quantum physics results and nobody talks about it as much as MIT or Google labs

[BanterQueen]

Curious whether YIG purity at this level is even remotely scalable to industrial manufacturing or if this stays a boutique lab material for years

[Phil7]

Comparable to superconducting qubits is doing a lot of work in that sentence, comparable on what metric exactly, coherence time, gate fidelity, both

[Vector14]

I love that the researchers basically said the barrier was never physics, it was just how clean you can make the crystal, that is such a satisfying kind of result