This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, sharing the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,400 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.

Colorado Underground Research Institute

Colorado School of Mines began work on the Colorado Underground Research Institute (CURIE), as part of the Elevate Quantum consortium that secured $127 million in Department of Commerce Tech Hub funding. The institute is housed in a former gold and silver mine that the university has used for research for more than 100 years.

CURIE will support both academic and corporate projects. Infrastructure work is underway, and the first experiments are expected to begin in 2026.

“[CURIE will] allow researchers to test very sensitive equipment such as quantum sensors and devices in a very low-background environment, shielded from cosmic rays and electromagnetic noise prevalent at the surface,” said Fred Sarazin, head of the physics department at Colorado School of Mines.

Read the university’s full announcement.

Quantum-safe video

Engineers at Florida International University published an encryption algorithm for quantum-safe video transmission. A pseudorandom number generated key is used to perform a row-wise XOR operation along with the secure SSL-encrypted HTTP transmission. Findings showed their approach to be 10 to 15 percent more effective than comparable advanced encryption techniques.

"We are preparing for quantum threats that will emerge within the next decade as these computers gain greater interest; creating scalable solutions that can protect real-time applications like Zoom; and optimizing efficiency so organizations don't have to choose between security and performance," according to Yashas Hariprasad, who recently completed his PhD at FIU.

This research was published in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics.

Quantum networking chip

Cisco announced a prototype Quantum Network Entanglement Chip for scaling quantum networks and connecting quantum processors. The chip uses existing fiber optic infrastructure. It includes spontaneous four-wave mixing on a silicon platform and generates more than 1 million useable entangled photon pairs per second per channel.

Galan Moody’s research team at UC Santa Barbara contributed to the project.

Cisco released a technical description of the chip, and the announcement was covered by Reuters.

11 miles

Researchers at the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology connected their campuses with a quantum network. The project used single photons to transmit information about 11 miles at room temperature using optical wavelengths.

This work was published in Optica Quantum.

Quickbits

• Benchmarking quantum gates and circuits (ACS Chemical Reviews)

• Scaling up superconducting quantum computers (Nature Electronics)

• Universal distributed blind quantum computing with solid-state qubits (Science)

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