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Stopping quantum decoherence

Nature: In the quest for a quantum computer, no obstacle is more formidable than decoherence — the 'collapse' of an information-encoding quantum wavefunction when it couples to its surroundings. We pressingly need to understand what causes it, how it works and how to get rid of it. Bertaina and colleagues have passed a milestone on that road. They report the first observation of Rabi oscillations, a signature of coherent spin dynamics, in a magnetic molecule of a kind envisaged as the basic physical carrier of a 'qubit' of quantum information in a quantum computer. Perhaps more importantly, they have also succeeded in pinpointing the sources of decoherence in their system, and so taken the first step towards eliminating them.

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