Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,500 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.

Hyper-entanglement

A team at Caltech showed that atomic motion can be used to encode quantum information. That motion, which is “typically treated as a source of unwanted noise in quantum systems, can be turned into a strength,” an announcement from the university said. Researchers cooled individual neutral atoms in optical tweezers to their motional ground state, then coherently manipulated the state to perform mid-circuit readout and mid-circuit erasure detection.

The team was also able to hyper-entangle pairs of atoms, such that their individual states of motion and their individual electronic states were correlated. They believe this is the first demonstration of hyper-entanglement in massive particles like neutral atoms or ions.

This research was published in Science.

Unexpected interfacial layer

Researchers at Brookhaven National Lab revealed the structure and composition of an unexpected metal-substrate interfacial layer in a tantalum metal and a sapphire substrate, materials often used in the creation of superconducting qubits. Using X-ray reflectivity experiments and the lab’s Spectroscopy Soft and Tender 2 beamline, they characterized the thickness and density of each layer in the sample, as well as the chemical makeup of the layers. They also used computational simulations to determine why there were different tantalum orientations at the interface, according to an announcement. 

This work was published in Advanced Science.

Intercrystals

A new class of materials called intercrystals may allow for more efficient transistors and atomic sensors, according to physicists at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and variability in intercrystals’ structure can lead to unusual characteristics, such as superconductivity and magnetism.

The team built the first intercrystal by stacking two ultrathin layers of graphene in a hexagonal grid and twisting them slightly on top of a layer of hexagonal boron nitride.

This work was published in Nature Materials.

IonQ

IonQ’s CEO Niccolo de Masi spoke to analysts at Global Quantum Intelligence about the company’s future, its recent acquisitions of networking companies, and consolidation in the quantum computing industry. The interview was published in the Quantum Computing Report.

Quickbits

• Neural-Network-Based Design of Approximate Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill Code (PRL)

• Beyond-classical computation in quantum simulation (Science)

• Scaling Advantage in Approximate Optimization with Quantum Annealing (PRL)

We hope you’ll make Quantum Campus one of your weekly reads. Like it? Be sure to share with your colleagues. Not your thing? Unsubscribe at the bottom of the page.