Diamond Quantum Memory: The Breakthrough That Could Finally Make Quantum Computing Practical
For decades, quantum computing has been the ultimate “five years away” technology. We’ve built impressive prototypes, demonstrated quantum supremacy on narrow tasks, and attracted billions in investment, yet scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computers remain elusive. The core problem has never been raw qubit count alone; it’s been coherence time and error correction . Enter diamond-based quantum memory — a technology that is rapidly moving from university labs to commercial roadmaps and may finally break the deadlock. What Is Quantum Memory and Why Has It Been So Hard? A quantum computer isn’t useful if its qubits lose their delicate quantum states in microseconds. Quantum memory is exactly what it sounds like: a system that can take a qubit’s information, store it reliably for a relatively long time (milliseconds to seconds, not nanoseconds), and then release it on demand with extremely high fidelity. Until recently, the best quantum memories were superconducting cavities, ion ...