Jian-Rui Soh

Quantum memory is like a fragile snowflake: one wrong move and it melts. Scientists are hunting for materials where such a "snowflake" can be held without fear of it melting. In the new work, they studied a calcium tungstate crystal doped with erbium, a rare-earth metal. It turned out that erbium inside this crystal has a hidden property that helps hold onto information.

A calcium tungstate (CaWO₄) crystal is like a musical instrument: its atoms vibrate like strings, and these vibrations can 'drown out' fragile quantum information. To understand exactly how this happens, scientists bombarded the crystal with neutrons and recorded the response — producing a map of all possible vibrations, from low notes to very high ones.

The magnetic framework of the EuMnSb2 crystal resembles scaffolding: manganese atoms form rigid vertical pillars, while europium atoms act as movable crossbars. Until now, there was no consensus on the angle at which these crossbars rest and how they rotate when a magnetic field presses on the scaffold.