Science Daily November 9, 2018
While a single spin is easily disrupted, a coupled-spin system can resist decoherence by using a subspace of states that is immune to magnetic field fluctuations. An international team of researchers (South Korea, USA – industry) engineered the magnetic interactions between the electron spins of two spin-1/2 atoms to create a “clock transition” and thus enhance their spin coherence. To construct and electrically access the desired spin structures, they used atom manipulation combined with electron spin resonance. They showed that a two-level system composed of a singlet state and a triplet state is insensitive to local and global magnetic field noise, resulting in much longer spin coherence times compared with individual atoms. Research has impact on quantum information processing and spintronic devices…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Two magnetically coupled atoms on a surface protect the spin states from the environment. The tip of a scanning tunneling microscope is used to electrically detect and control the atoms’ spin states. Credit: IBS