An international team of physicists has achieved data rates that exceed 1 GHz, more than 100 times greater than the speed of existing quantum memories.

The method also offers long coherence times of several microseconds.

A signal containing the information and a write pulse are sent together into a cesium vapor cell. The vapor turns the pulses into a spin wave, and the information can be retrieved by a read pulse that converts the spin wave into an optical signal. (K.F. Reim et al.)