A 'big bet?' $500 million in investments for this campus

We’re back after our winter break. Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology from university campuses. We publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from researchers across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

‘Big bet’ on quantum

Maryland Governor Wes Moore, University of Maryland President Darryll Pines, and IonQ CEO Peter Chapman announced the “Capital of Quantum” Initiative this week. The public-private partnership represents nearly $500 million in quantum-related investments.

The initiative includes more than $200 million from the state, with $185 million going to construction of a new campus building housing quantum laboratories. IonQ, meanwhile, will grow its local workforce and facilities with a data center, laboratories, and office space in the university’s “Discovery District.”

Read Maryland’s “Capital of Quantum” announcement. The Baltimore Banner also covered the state’s “big bet” on quantum economic development.

Fractional excitons

Physicists at Brown observed a novel class of quantum particles called fractional excitons. To produce the particles, they carefully manipulated an electrical charge through two layers of graphene separated by an insulating crystal of hexagonal boron nitride, then exposed the resulting excitons to a very strong magnetic field.

The particles’ behavior showed tendencies of both bosons and fermions, as well as properties that set them apart from anyons, according to the team in an announcement from Brown.

“Our findings point toward an entirely new class of quantum particles that carry no overall charge but follow unique quantum statistics,” said Brown’s Jia Li. ““We’ve essentially unlocked a new dimension for exploring and manipulating this phenomenon [to, among other things, store quantum information].”

This work was published in Nature earlier this month.

Quantum teleportation over active internet fiber

Northwestern engineers demonstrated quantum teleportation over an active fiber optic cable carrying internet traffic for the first time. After conducting in-depth studies of how light scatters within fiber optic cables, the researchers found a less crowded wavelength of light to place their photons. They also added special filters to reduce noise from regular internet traffic.

“This is incredibly exciting because nobody thought it was possible,” said Prem Kumar, who led the study. “Our work shows a path towards next-generation quantum and classical networks sharing a unified fiber optic infrastructure. Basically, it opens the door to pushing quantum communications to the next level.”

Read the paper in Optica.

Leakage errors in neutral atom platforms

Sandia National Lab and the University of New Mexico showed for the first time a practical way to detect leakage errors in neutral atom quantum platforms.

Matthew Chow, a PhD student at New Mexico and intern at Sandia, made the key discovery behind the study while debugging code as part of his dissertation, according to an announcement by Sandia. “The code diagnoses the entangling interaction by repeatedly applying an operation and comparing the results when two atoms interact versus when only one atom is present. When the atoms interact, the repeated application of the operation makes them switch between entangled and disentangled states. Every other run, when the atoms were disentangled, the outcome for the two-atom case was markedly different from the solo-atom case.

[C]how had found a subtle signal to indicate a neighboring atom was present in a quantum computer without observing it directly.”

This work was published in PRX Quantum.

Quickbits

• Rice team models paraparticle that shows exchange statistics inequivalent to either fermions or bosons (Nature)

• University of Wisconsin startup Qolab collects $16 million funding round

• DOE announces $625 million in funding for new group of National Quantum Information Science Research Centers

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