DARPA QBI selects 11 companies for Stage 2

Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,700 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.

Princeton qubit

A team from Princeton designed a transmon-based superconducting qubit that is capable of coherence times of more than 1 millisecond. That is about three times longer than any qubit survives in a lab setting, the team said in an announcement, and 15 times the state-of-the-art in commercial qubits.

The qubit is based on tantalum with a high-resistivity silicon substrate, meaning it can “potentially be fabricated at the wafer scale and therefore can be readily translated to large-scale quantum processors,” according to the team. The work was funded by the Department of Energy and Google Quantum AI.

This work was published in Nature.

DOE quantum funding

The Department of Energy announced $625 million in funding to renew its five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers for an additional five years. The centers include:

• Brookhaven’s Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (which funded Princeton’s work above).

• Fermilab’s Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center.

• Argonne’s Q-NEXT. 

• Lawrence Berkeley’s Quantum Systems Accelerator.

• Oak Ridge’s Quantum Science Center.

Canada’s newly elected prime minister, meanwhile, included $1 billion over five years for quantum investments in his first budget proposal this week.

Quantum oscillations

An international group of physicists led by the University of Michigan induced quantum oscillations in the bulk of the insulator YbB₁₂. YbB₁₂ is a Kondo insulator that is being studied as a possible topological insulator.

In what must be one of the most refreshing quotes in an announcement this year, project lead Lu Li said, “I would love to claim that there’s a great application, but my work keeps pushing that dream further away…I wish I knew what to do with that, but at this stage we have no idea. What we have right now is experimental evidence of a remarkable phenomenon, we’ve recorded it and, hopefully, at some point, we’ll realize how to use it.”

This work was published in Physical Review Letters.

DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative

DARPA selected 11 companies to enter the second stage of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative yesterday. Advancing to this stage unlocks additional possible funding, as DARPA evaluates each company’s quantum computing research and development plan and determines “whether they are on track to meet not only near-term milestones, but also the ultimate objective: a useful quantum computer by 2033.”

The selected companies — based in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom — include:

• Atom Computing (neutral atom)

• Diraq (spin)

• IBM (superconducting)

• IonQ (trapped ion)

• Nord Quantique (superconducting)

• Photonic Inc. (spin)

• Quantinuum (trapped ion)

• Quantum Motion (spin)

• QuEra (neutral atom)

• Silicon Quantum Computing (neutral atom)

• Xanadu (photonic)

The agency said in an announcement that it anticipates additional teams to advance to all three stages of the initiative on an ongoing basis. Companies entered the evaluation process on varying timelines.

Quickbits

• Probing non-equilibrium topological order on a quantum processor (Nature)

• Free-Electron Interaction With Nonlinear Optical States (IEEE Photonics)

• Quantum resilient security framework for privacy preserving AI in Apple MM1 on device architecture (Scientific Reports)

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.