Mikhael T. Sayat

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.