
While I'm not a physicist, and thus less involved in physical implementations of quantum computers, this is pretty exciting news. Decoherence is a big problem in physical implementations- essentially the state unintentionally collapsing through inadvertant measurement. When any measurement (perhaps partial) occurs the qubits collapse from possible superposition to a state that can be represented classically, that is by bits instead of qubits. So essentially one can think of decoherence as unintended measurements taking a system out of superposition.
(On a somewhat related note, this is why quantum operations must be reversible. Irreversible operations require energy to erase information, and input of energy acts as a measurement.)
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