Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,900 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. See something interesting? Be sure to share it.

Nature took the temperature of a global group of leading quantum computing researchers on the state of the field. With qubit fidelities that “sounded like science fiction until just a few years ago” and a consensus that gate-based quantum computing with error correction is a viable path forward, some are seeing a “vibe shift” toward optimism. Others — Nobel winner John Martinis among them — argue for caution because of the huge systems engineering challenges that still lay ahead.

Vibe shifts are impossible to quantify, yet difficult to deny. Read the full take in Nature.

Infleqtion earned a $6.2 million ARPA-E grant to develop quantum-enhanced computational methods for electrical grid optimization. The company will work with partners at Argonne National Lab, the National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly the National Renewable Energy Laboratory), the Electric Power Research Institute, and ComEd. Among other things, the project is charged with identifying use cases for new algorithmic toolsets, developing and scaling software for those use cases, and validating it on “quantum computing hardware components,” according to DOE compliance documentation.

An aging, overtaxed power grid makes efforts to improve power generation and coordination a priority nationally. And grid optimization has long been considered a problem set that quantum computing is well suited to address. Here’s a chance for quantum to help make a landscape full of power-hungry AI datacenters more viable.

Read the announcement from Infleqtion.

New theory work by physicists at University at Buffalo and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz revealed unexpected behavior in Rydberg arrays’ pre-thermal states. Simulating the arrays inside an optical cavity, the team showed that atoms and photons can remain at different temperatures while interacting for long periods.

“Thermal equilibrium alters quantum properties, effectively erasing the very information those properties represent in a quantum computer,” said Buffalo’s Jamir Marino. “So delaying thermal equilibrium between photons and atoms — even for just milliseconds — offers a temporal window to preserve and process useful quantum behavior.”

The work demonstrates a possible method of using light to connect qubits in future neutral-atom quantum computers. This work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Last week’s issue of Quantum Campus incorrectly characterized work by researchers at Columbia and the University of Texas, describing their solid-state experiments as instead relying on optical devices. We apologize for the error. A corrected version is available in our archive, and the full paper can be read in Nature.

Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.