Quantum Campus shares 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.

Cherry-picking?

A set of emails obtained by Science and Retraction Watch revealed that co-authors of a 2017 quantum computing paper had concerns about data processing procedures and cherry-picking. The paper from the Delft University ran in Nature Communications, which issued an expression of editorial concern in April 2025. Two other quantum-related papers from Delft were retracted from Nature in 2021 and 2022.

The research explored the design of nanowires as qubits and was funded by Microsoft. Microsoft’s recently announced Majorana 1 chip also uses nanowires as qubits.

One of the co-authors, Vincent Mourik, wrote that he was “very appalled by the undisclosed data processing done by [corresponding authors Hao Zhang and Önder Gül.]” “They assumed the effect they were trying to prove, and achieved this through massaging of data and theory gymnastics,” he told Science this week.

Gül, meanwhile, said in Science that: “While some of these steps were not described in the original publication, I do not view them as ‘data manipulation.’”

Read the full story in Science.

No cure-all

A team from the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Microsoft showed that it is impossible to design an independent entanglement purification protocol that can be applied universally to counteract noise in all quantum systems. Their study argued that purification protocols often work, but no one method works in all cases.

“In quantum information, we often hope for a protocol that works in all scenarios — a kind of cure-all,” the University of Chicago’s Tian Zhong said in an announcement. “This result shows that when it comes to purifying entanglement, that’s simply too good to be true.”

This work was published in Physical Review Letters.

IBM roadmap

IBM Research’s Vice President of Quantum Computing Jay Gambetta discussed the company’s quantum roadmap at the Think conference in early May. Watch the keynote below.

Petahertz quantum transistor

University of Arizona researchers demonstrated light-induced quantum tunnelling currents in graphene phototransistors by ultrafast laser pulses in an ambient environment. The tunnelling current and the graphene phototransistor conductivity are both tunable. Using this approach, the team used a laser that switches off and on at a rate of 638 attoseconds to create what Arizona’s Mohammed Hassan called "the world's fastest petahertz quantum transistor" in an announcement.

This work was published in Nature Communications.

Quickbits

• Experimental Quantum Simulation of Chemical Dynamics (Journal of the American Chemical Society)

• Quantum error correction of qudits beyond break-even (Nature)

• Topological blocking at the Bi(111) surface due to surface relaxation (Physical Review B)

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