This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, which shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,600 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.

Sovereign wealth fund

Pat Gelsinger, former Intel CEO and general partner at the deep-tech VC Playground, supported establishing a sovereign wealth fund for the United States in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Norway and Singapore serve as his as examples of successful state-run and -financed investment funds.

“American firms have to grapple with difficult market distortions thanks to Chinese state investment, which places U.S. tech companies at a disadvantage. Beijing has formed various state-backed venture funds to invest in AI, quantum research and semiconductor manufacturing,” he wrote.

“Quantum computing illustrates the need for such a fund. American firms like PsiQuantum and Google have achieved significant breakthroughs, yet scaling these technologies requires patient, long-term capital typically unavailable from Wall Street or traditional venture funds.”

The Wall Street Journal independently reported this week that the Trump administration was “thinking of [$550 billion outlined in the recent trade deal with Japan] like a sovereign-wealth fund that Japan is funding,” but that “the sources and structure of the funding are still being determined.”

Responses to the idea of U.S sovereign wealth fund vary. Think tanks of different stripes from the Cato Institute to the Carnegie Endowment have been skeptical of the concept, while former Biden Deputy National Security Advisor and chief global economist at Prudential Global Investment Management Daleep Singh has discussed the geopolitical value of a sovereign wealth fund.

Metasurfaces

Harvard engineers demonstrated metasurfaces that can generate entangled photons to carry out quantum operations, achieving what typically requires complex optical rigs with many components. These metasurfaces, with patterns etched at the nanoscale to manipulate light, “could efficiently scale optical quantum computers and networks — which has long been their biggest challenge compared to other platforms like superconductors or atoms,” according to Neal Sinclair, a research scientist on the team.

This work was published in Science.

Most accurate clock

NIST developed the world’s most accurate atomic clock with colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder. Based on a trapped aluminum ion, it keeps time with 19 decimal places of accuracy. It is 41 percent more accurate than the previous record holder and 2.6 times more stable than any other ion clock.

This work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Quantum chemistry

An international workshop organized by Pacific Northwest National Lab and Microsoft explored what it would take to make calculations on a quantum computer practical in the next three to five years. Attendees highlighted the need for tiered quantum workflows, co-design among software developers and hardware developers on multiple platforms, industrywide benchmarks, and cross-functional training for the emerging quantum workforce.

Their findings and insights were published by the American Chemical Society’s Chemical & Engineering News.

Quickbits

• An open-source initiative would benefit quantum computing (Nature Reviews Physics)

• Quantum computing edges closer to biotech reality in Moderna-IBM pact (R&D World)

• Quantum Kernel Learning for Small Dataset Modeling in Semiconductor Fabrication (Advanced Science)

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.