Zinc oxide gets a candidate spin qubit designed from first principles

An international team led by SKKU identified an atomic defect in zinc oxide that could work as a spin qubit, pointing toward more manufacturable quantum hardware.

A research team led by SKKU professor Hosung Seo, working with the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Washington, has identified an atomic defect in zinc oxide that could serve as a spin qubit — the basic unit of some quantum machines. The work was published in PRX Quantum in 2026. The defect is a molybdenum-oxygen-vacancy complex: a molybdenum atom taking the place of a zinc atom next to a missing oxygen atom.

The team screened candidate defects across the periodic table using first-principles quantum simulations on supercomputers. Zinc oxide is appealing because it is magnetically quiet, has almost no nuclear spins, and can be grown as ultrahigh-purity crystals. Under illumination the defect emits bright, sharp visible light, its electron spin can hold quantum information for about 4 milliseconds even amid magnetic noise, and its properties allow reading the spin state in a single measurement.

The scale that matters here is manufacturability. The leading spin-qubit platform, the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond, is held back because diamond is hard to grow into large, high-quality crystals. A material that grows cleanly could ease that bottleneck — and cheaper, more scalable quantum hardware eventually feeds computation that serves everyone.

The important caveat: the defect was identified and analyzed through simulation, and the single-shot readout was demonstrated theoretically. Physical fabrication and measurement are the next test, and the paper does not describe building the device.

Source: Phys.org