Just as electrons flow through an electrical conductor, magnetic excitations can travel through certain materials. Such excitations, known in physics as 'magnons' in analogy to the electron, could transport information much more easily than electrical conductors.

While the number of qubits and the stability of quantum states are still limiting current quantum computing devices, there are questions where these processors are already able to leverage their computing power.

A team headed by Alexander Holleitner and Reinhard Kienberger, Physics professors at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has succeeded for the first time in generating ultrashort electric pulses on a chip using metal antennas only a few nanometres in size, then running the signals a few millimetres above the surface and reading them in again a controlled manner. The technology enables the development of new, powerful terahertz components.