Physicists have stored a quantum bit of information at room temperature for more than 39 minutes, smashing the previous record of just 2 seconds.

Mike Thewalt at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, and his colleagues stored the bit in the nuclear spins of ionized phosphorus atoms embedded in a highly enriched silicon crystal, using optical and radio-frequency light to encode and read out the bit.

The next step is to find a reliable way to connect the nuclear spin state memory to the electronic spin states of atoms, which are more likely to be used in quantum computer processing. Storing quantum bits at room temperature would boost efforts to create a practical quantum computer.

Science 342, 830–833 (2013)