Quantum energy storage? Just add a third qubit

This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, sharing the latest in quantum science and technology from university campuses. We publish every Friday and are always looking for news from researchers across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

Extracting energy from quantum teleportation

Researchers at Purdue published a new quantum energy teleportation protocol that for the first time allows energy to be stored. “Traditional QET protocols extract energy from what we refer to as a ‘quasi-vacuum’ state, but the extracted quantum energy is dissipated into classical devices, limiting its practical utility. To address this limitation, we propose an enhanced QET protocol that incorporates an additional qubit, enabling the stored energy to be stored within a quantum register for future use,” the team said in their paper.

They tested the protocol running quantum circuits on IBM quantum hardware and a classical simulator with results that closely matched theoretical predictions.

Read a write up of the study in New Scientist.

Metamaterials for dilution refrigerators

University of Iowa’s Fatima Toor received $1 million from DOE’s EPSCoR program to build novel metamaterial coatings for the dilution refrigerators used to keep superconductors at low temperatures.

Even tiny amounts of stray infrared light can leak into those refrigerators and add significant noise to qubit operations, according to Toor. The materials her team is designing can adhere to multiple layers inside the dilution refrigerator, minimize photon leakage, and potentially increase the coherence times of qubit operations.

Read more in the University of Iowa release.

Quantum security for deep learning

Basing their work on the idea that it is impossible to create an independent and identical copy of an arbitrary unknown quantum state, an MIT team introduced a security protocol that leverages the quantum properties of light to guarantee that data remains secure during cloud-based deep-learning computations. Using the protocol, the server encodes the weights of a deep neural network into an optical field using laser light. The protocol was presented at Qcrypt 2024 in September.

Find out more in MIT’s release. 

Quantum materials for nanotech

The University of Nebraska’s Emergent Quantum Materials and Technologies team demonstrated that chromium oxide doped with boron can be used to voltage-control spin structure in antiferromagnetic magnetoelectric thin films and devices at room temperature. The work was published in Advanced Functional Materials.

Read more from the University of Nebraska’s announcement.

Quickbits

• Montana State’s Mosquera wins CAREER award to develop modeling platform for quantum systems

• IonQ scores $54.5 million contract with Air Force Research Lab

• IBM opens its quantum computing stack to third-party tools

• Germany contracts for development of world’s first mobile quantum computer

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