'Quantum Disney World?' Illinois envisions companies lining up

This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, sharing 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.

‘A line of potential customers’

In a deep dive on the new Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, its incoming CEO and CTO sat for a 30-minute interview. They described how the $500 million in state support would be divvied up — with $100 million going to site prep and construction, $200 million going to what is expected to be the largest cryo plant in the United States, and $200 million going to co-investments with companies moving into the park. The team also discussed the Illinois-DARPA Proving Ground, a space to prototype and test promising quantum technologies backed by $140 million from DARPA and a match by the state.

“Chicago has a really booming commercial, industrial ecosystem across many different sectors. It’s a very diverse economy,” Harley Johnson said. Johnson is a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and CEO of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park.

“You’ve got a lot of companies who see themselves as potential end users for a quantum computing resource…When solutions start to become available, the companies that are situated [in the park] are going to have a line of potential customers waiting to get engaged.”

Hear more about what host Konstantinos Karagiannis called “Quantum Disney World” on The Post-Quantum World podcast.

‘Filthy dirty’

A team from Pacific Northwest National Lab, MIT’s Lincoln Lab, NIST, University of Colorado, and Centre College published a pair of studies showing which sources of stray radiation present the biggest threats to quantum computers and pointing to effective measures for shielding equipment. The papers appeared in APS’s PRX Quantum and Journal of Instrumentation.

“Once we established the effect of ionizing radiation on superconducting qubits, we knew we needed to systematically and quantitatively identify sources of radiation in the environment,” said lead experimental physicist Ben Loer.

“We found that a lot of the electrical connectors are just filthy dirty from the standpoint of acting as a radiation source,” Brent VanDevender, another team lead, said. 

Get more details in PNNL’s announcement.

Winger molecular crystals

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab captured direct images of a new quantum phase of an electron solid, the Wigner molecular crystal, for the first time. They placed an atomically thin bilayer of tungsten disulfide on top of a 49-nanometer-thick layer of hexagonal boron nitride and a graphite back gate. The results were published in Science and showed that that doping the structure with electrons filled each 10-nanometer-wide unit cell of the material with just two or three electrons.

Read the announcement from Berkeley Lab.

Floquet Majorana fermions

Indiana University’s Babak Seradjeh and his colleagues at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur showed an unexpected relationship between Floquet Majorana fermions and the quantum tunneling process known as the Josephson effect, which allows current to flow between two superconductors without the need for an applied voltage. The team confirmed through a series of numerical simulations that “the strength of the Josephson current can be tuned using the chemical potential of the superconductors,” according to an announcement from Indiana University. “This could provide scientists a new level of control over quantum materials and opens up possibilities for applications in quantum information processing, where precise manipulation of quantum states is critical.”

The work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Quickbits

• 3D quantum architecture reduces the number of qubits needed for error correction

• Two methods reduce the amount of quantum memory needed to model complex quantum systems

• Heidelberg Laureate Forum applications now open for 2025

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