TEKNIK ELEKTRONIKA

Scientists at the Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) and the Ames Laboratory of the US Department of Energy have managed to fully protect the spin state of a single electron from its environment. Single solid state spins are promising building blocks for new quantum technologies, such as quantum computers, but uncontrolled interactions between spins and their environment have been a major obstacle. By repeatedly flipping the spin of a single electron with very short pulses, the researchers were able to mitigate these effects, effectively decoupling the spin from its environment. They also showed that the technique works with any possible spin state, a stringent requirement for use in a future quantum computer.
The researchers worked with single electrons in diamond, a material that has recently become very popular with quantum scientists. Diamonds have the unique property that quantum mechanical effects can be seen even at room temperature, which is a major advantage for future applications. Previously the researchers were able to measure the spin state of a single electron in diamond and probe its environment. Now, using high-frequency pulses only a few nanoseconds long, the team has achieved control over the state of a single spin with unprecedented accuracy. They have exploited this control to protect the spin from its environment, a groundbreaking result.

The researchers periodically rotated the spin with very high precision so that the environmental effects were fully cancelled by averaging. This caused the spin to be virtually decoupled from its environment. The more often they flipped the spin, the longer its quantum state was preserved. With 130 pulses, the duration of the spin state was 25 times longer than previously measured. In addition, they demonstrated that the protection is effective for any arbitrary spin state.

These results are a true breakthrough for quantum science and engineering, where uncontrolled interactions with the environment have up to now been a major obstacle to new basic research and applications.

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