Comment by gaze
I’m not totally sure what makes this result so novel but also that’s probably due to my ignorance. Hyperfine qubits are pretty common using neutral atoms, and you can do imaging on the hyperfine states. Is the novelty here that the electron spin is on resonance with the nuclear spin and that it’s done with STM? I guess I don’t see how pump-probe is so much more direct than using an imaging transition.
I think the key thing they were pointing out was the ability to store information inside a nucleus that can be read back (reminds me of how core memory worked on the old Apollo 11 Era computers) which could be a very reliable and dense memory. It's reliable because the electron shell is sort of protecting the information stored inside the nucleus.
I wonder if they'll have the same issue that core memory also had which is that by reading the magnetic state you also destroy that state, and so every bit 'read' operation has to be followed with a 'now write the bit back again' step.