DOGE threat? 'I'm not worried about playing defense'

This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, which shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,400 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

Improving quantum dot performance

Chemists at the University of Oklahoma and Northwestern covered perovskite quantum dots with a layer of stacked phenethylammonium ligands to drastically improve the dots’ performance. The crystalized molecular layer neutralizes surface defects and stabilizes the surface lattices, according to an announcement from the University of Oklahoma, and the dots operate at nearly 100 percent efficiency at room temperature.

Traditional quantum dots often fail after as little as 20 minutes. The team’s molecular layer, however, extended the continuous photon emission of the dots to more than 12 hours without any decay and virtually no blinking.

The work was published in Nature Communications.

Quantum sensors

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and NIST developed a new frequency comb laser capable of identifying the constituent molecules within a gas at concentrations down to parts per trillion. Their technique, called modulated ringdown comb interferometry, is simple enough to be deployed quickly on everything from diagnosing illnesses to tracking greenhouse gas emissions from factories, according to the team.

“Even today I still find it unbelievable that the most capable sensing tool can in fact be built with such simplicity, using only mature technical ingredients but tied together with a clever computation algorithm,” said Qizhong Liang, lead author and a PhD student at CU Boulder and NIST’s JILA institute.

Read the full paper in Nature.

‘Significant national priority’

Paul Stimers, the executive director of the Quantum Industry Coalition, discussed the future of federal funding, the reauthorization of the National Quantum Initiative, and the new director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in an extended interview with Politico.

“Everybody readily understands that quantum computing, quantum clocks and sensors, quantum networking, quantum communication and post quantum cryptography are critically important from a national security perspective,” Stimers said.

That’s just not something we can allow ourselves to fall behind on, and nobody is suggesting otherwise…I think obviously we’re seeing a certain amount of disruption as DOGE [the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency] does its work. I expect that areas like quantum that are of significant national priority for the United States will turn out to be priorities when all is said and done.”

Read the full interview.

PsiQuantum’s new chipset

PsiQuantum announced its new quantum photonic chipset “purpose-built for utility-scale quantum computing.” Called Omega, it contains “all the advanced components required to build million-qubit-scale quantum computers,” according to the company.

Details of the chipset were released on Wednesday, showing 99.98 percent single-qubit state preparation and measurement fidelity, 99.5 percent two-photon quantum interference visibility, and 99.72 percent chip-to-chip quantum interconnect fidelity. It will be manufactured at at GlobalFoundries in New York.

These results were published in Nature.

Quickbits

• DARPA plans “major expansion” of Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (Breaking Defense)

• The Wall Street Journal and Scientific American talk to skeptics of Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip

• Purdue touts materials science contributions to Majorana 1 chip

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