Just a science project? Not to The Wall Street Journal

This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, which 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.

Glass and steel

The Wall Street Journal ran two major quantum stories this week. Monday’s highlighted NATO’s investment in Ephos, the first company to make photonic chips out of glass rather than silicon. Researchers argue that the technology is more energy efficient than other approaches. The company will rely on U.S. and European suppliers exclusively and has offices in Milan and San Francisco, according to Reuters.

Thursday’s article profiled the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, which is expected to break ground on the site of a former steel plant in 2025, and PsiQuantum, which says it will build the first U.S.-based utility-scale quantum computer in the park by 2028. Nature also covered PsiQuantum’s proposed system in late November.

Phonon imaging

Researchers at the University of California Irvine imaged the atomic-scale mechanics of vibrations at the interface of an iron selenide ultra-thin film and a strontium titanate substrate, observing new phonons thought to help explain the material’s relatively high-temperature transition to superconductivity.

“Our vibrational spectroscopy approach enabled us to achieve highly detailed imaging of the vibrations at the superconducting material’s interface with its substrate,” said UC Irvine’s Xiaoqing Pan, who led the work. “The observed variation in the interlayer spacing correlates with the superconducting gap, which demonstrates the crucial role of spacing in electron-phonon coupling strength and superconductivity.”

Precisely identifying individual atomic contributions to the enhancement of the superconducting transition temperature is an important step toward scalable fabrication and utilization of superconductors in a range of applications like quantum computers and advanced medical devices.

The findings were published in Nature.

Time crystals

An international team observed a prethermal topologically ordered time crystal with programmable superconducting qubits arranged on a square lattice. By periodically driving the superconducting qubits with a surface code Hamiltonian, they were able to produce discrete time-translation symmetry breaking dynamics that only manifested in the subharmonic temporal response of nonlocal logical operators.

As explained by a write-up of the research in Popular Mechanics, “[T]ime crystals behave like standard crystalline structures but across time. Where a normal crystal…repeats in atomic structure, a time crystal repeats not in a physical dimension, but a temporal one.”

The group included members from Zhejiang University, Tsinghua University, the University of Maryland, the Colorado School of Mines, Iowa State, and NIST. Their work was published in Nature Communications.

Optical quantum interconnects

Founded by former members of Mikhail Lukin’s lab at Harvard, Lightsynq launched with $18 million in seed funding. The company will build universal optical quantum interconnects, based on diamond photonic integrated circuits that will be able to host several hundred quantum memory channels in parallel.

Research from the team on quantum memory and quantum networks has been published previously in Nature and Science.

Quickbits

• Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization offers $1.3 million prize for applications of quantum computing to societal issues

• $2.7 billion National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act introduced in the Senate

• University of Missouri joins IBM Quantum Network

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