A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive
at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier
towards building ultrafast quantum computers.
An international team including Stephanie Simmons of Oxford
University report in this week's Science a test performed as part of a project
led by Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University, Canada, and colleagues. In
conventional computers, data is stored as a string of 1s and 0s. In the
experiment, quantum bits of information, 'qubits', were put into a
'superposition' state in which they can be both 1s and 0 at the same time –
enabling them to perform multiple calculations simultaneously.