Three charged ytterbium atoms are arranged in a triangle inside an electromagnetic trap. Normally, they all communicate with each other, like three people at a table constantly exchanging remarks. But if one of them steps into the next room, the conversation continues between the remaining two.

That's exactly what the physicists did: using a laser, they transferred one ion into a special long-lived state — a kind of "rest room" where the atom does not participate in quantum operations. The other two ions continued to interact as if the third were not there. Meanwhile, the ion itself remained in the trap, just temporarily "switched off" from the network.

Importantly, the "switched-off" ion did not spoil the quantum computations. Its random return to the game turned out to be extremely slow — thousands of times slower than the quantum operations themselves. This gives engineers plenty of time to perform computations with the desired qubit configuration.

Ion-based quantum computers are among the most accurate, but controlling the connections between qubits in them is difficult. The new technique makes such machines more flexible: the same ion chain can solve different tasks by simply changing who "talks" to whom.