Zinc oxide atomic defect advances scalable, high-purity, magnetically quiet semiconductors with higher-temperature spin qubit operation

https://phys.org/news/2026-07-world-zinc-oxide-qubit-advance.html

"silicon or diamond quantum platforms exhibit magnetic noise or complex fabrication problems limiting large-scale integration... overcome using molybdenum-vacancy defect acting as optically addressable, triplet spin qubits... leverages zinc oxide’s low background nuclear spin/ weak electron-phonon coupling, suppressing lattice vibration interference/ maintaining long spin coherence times... high-fidelity single-shot readout... optically integrable semiconductor platform for quantum computing, optical telecom"