Strontium links atoms, calcium preserves entanglement for longer
University of Oxford physicists entangled strontium and calcium atoms in a quantum network across two separate locations. Calcium atoms held the entanglement for more than 10 seconds, while the experiment produced shared quantum states involving up to four atoms.
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What this could mean
- 0–2 yearsPlausible
This hybrid-species scheme could enable a quantum repeater node to hold strontium-generated photonic links in long-lived calcium memory, allowing asynchronous entanglement swapping across metropolitan-scale networks within the next two years.
A calcium memory coherence time beyond 10 seconds is much longer than typical photonic link generation times, so a node could wait for multiple links to succeed before swapping. Strontium is already used as a photonic interface in trapped-ion networks, so the building blocks exist for combining them into a repeater.
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