Donghui Lu

A qubit, the computational unit of a quantum computer, lives for fractions of a millisecond before forgetting its state. One culprit is a tiny contact inside it: two layers of aluminum sandwiching a layer of aluminum oxide just a couple of nanometers thick.

Picture an orchestra in which violins and trumpets play different parts but together create a powerful sound. In a crystal of the layered magnet Fe5GeTe2 doped with nickel, tiny regions of a different phase, Fe6GeTe2 nanoprecipitates, take on the role of those instruments. It is they, not the nickel itself, that keep the material magnetic at 478 kelvin, that is, at 205 degrees Celsius.