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Holding a phone number in your head while people shout and slam doors around you is nearly impossible. That's roughly the life of a quantum bit, a qubit, in an ordinary material: the nuclei of neighboring atoms, like tiny magnets, constantly jostle it and erase information. To keep a qubit from forgetting, you need to find it a quiet spot.

That refuge turned out to be cerium oxide — a powder resembling white clay. It has very few atoms with magnetic nuclei, so the noise nearly falls silent. When you add the rare metal erbium to this powder (just a few atoms per billion), you get an ideal medium: an erbium qubit can store a quantum state for a whole second. For comparison, in that time light travels to the Moon and back.

But there's a trick. Scientists found special points — called "clock transitions"—where the qubit becomes deaf to the magnetic chatter of its surroundings. At these points, and at temperatures below one kelvin (colder than outer space), the lifetime skyrockets. And if you use a clever trick, a series of rapid pulses that flip the qubit in sync with the noise, you can suppress the noise even further.

The good news: cerium oxide plays nicely with the silicon chips that underpin all modern electronics. That means quantum memory could be embedded directly into familiar circuits. A tiny crystal grown on silicon stores entangled states while light in a neighboring fiber carries them across a quantum network. A quiet corner for the qubit has been found — now it's up to the engineers.