Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China have extended the lifetime of quantum entanglement in a room-temperature, solid-state system by up to a factor of 240. The work, led by Shuo Ren and Rui-Jian Liang, marks a significant practical gain for quantum technologies that operate without extreme cooling.
The team achieved the improvement by transferring entangled states from their original particles to nuclear spins. This nuclear-spin swap preserves the fragile quantum correlations far longer than usual at room temperature, where such states typically decay quickly.
Extending entanglement lifetime is a key step toward practical quantum memory and communication systems. The result shows that carefully chosen spin interactions can protect quantum coherence under everyday conditions, rather than requiring the ultracold environments used in many other experiments.