The pulse of an atom's magnetic heart as it ticks back and forth between quantum states has been timed in a laboratory.

Physicists used a scanning tunneling microscope to observe electrons as they moved in sync with the nucleus of an atom of titanium-49, allowing them to estimate the duration of the core's magnetic beat in isolation.

"These findings," they write in their paper , "give an atomic-scale insight into the nature of nuclear spin relaxation and are relevant for the development of atomically assembled qubit platforms."

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Spin is a term physicists use to describe a quantum version of angular momentum . Not only is it fundamental to the behavior of magnets, it often forms the basis of quantum co

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