'Pulling the rug out?' No GRFP for 2nd year grad students

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GRFP

The National Science Foundation revealed last week that its Graduate Research Fellowship Program would not longer accept applications from second-year graduate students, as it has for decades. Faculty and students were particularly troubled by the timing of the announcement, according to an article in Science. They pointed out that graduate students are only allowed to apply once during their studies and that many likely had not applied during their first year, based on the previous rules. They were also disturbed by the fact that the application period had been shortened to only six weeks, less than half what it has been previously.

“It's completely unconscionable that NSF is pulling the rug out from under these students,” said Susan Brennan, a former GRFP director now at Stony Brook University.

Hundreds of former GRFP fellows and faculty who support them have signed an open letter, criticizing the changes and calling for updated guidance on the current solicitation.

Atom loss

Harvard researchers demonstrated a 3,000 qubit system capable of running continuously for more than two hours. The work was completed with colleagues at QuEra, a neutral atom quantum computing company that spun out of Harvard and MIT.

It relies on a new approach to the “fundamental bottleneck of atom loss,” according to Elias Trapp, a co-author and physics graduate student. “We’re showing a way where you can insert new atoms as you naturally lose them without destroying the information that’s already in the system.”

Over the two hours, the team cycled more than 50 million atoms through the system.

An early version of a paper on this work was published in Nature.

Boron nitride

A team at Washington University and Yale created new, high-pressure sensors from a sheet of crystallized boron nitride, squeezed between a pair of “diamond anvils.” They created vacancies in the boron nitride using neutron beams to trap electrons. Because it is essentially a two-dimensional material, unlike the diamond often used in vacancy-based quantum devices, the boron-nitride sensors can be placed much closer to the materials they are measuring.

Tests showed that the new sensors could detect subtle shifts in the magnetic field of a two-dimensional magnet. Next, the researchers plan to test other materials, including specimens of rocks like those found in the high-pressure environment of the Earth’s core and superconductors.

This work was published in Nature Communications and was also covered in a WashU announcement.

Model trains

Physicists at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and the the Polish Academy of Sciences leveraged the noise inherent in quantum computers to model unpredictable train travel times. The team modeled Baltimore’s Light RailLink, a hybrid tram-rail network that shares roads with cars. “The ‘N’ in NISQ stands for ‘noisy,’ but that doesn’t mean that the noise has to always be deleterious,” said Emery Doucet, a postdoc on the project. “We wondered if maybe we could use the noise that the device is subject to as a tool to model the chaos and randomness.”

The models considered 12 trains on systems from IonQ and D-Wave, and they were published in Scientific Reports.

Quickbits

• Low-overhead transversal fault tolerance for universal quantum computation (Nature)

• Bright triplet and bright charge-separated singlet excitons in organic diradicals enable optical read-out and writing of spin states (Nature Chemistry)

• NSF offers supplemental quantum funding to introduce and encourage collaboration with UK research institutes (Dear Colleague letter)

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.