Who controls the supply chains? Quantum manufacturing's future

Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,700 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.

Supply chain assessment

Prineha Narang, a physics professor at UCLA and CTO of the quantum networking company Aliro, partnered with the Foundation for American Innovation’s Joshua Levine to consider: Do American manufacturing capacity and secure supply chains ensure that leadership translates to strategic advantage? The pair published the first piece in a four part series last week in “War on the Rocks,” a leading national security publication.

The article compared the capitalization and output of major quantum companies and highlighted the fact that quantum sensing is “generating the clearest commercial traction” with “working systems and paying customers.”

They said: “A lead in deploying quantum technologies shows great promise for scientific discovery, economic innovation, and national security…But ensuring American companies can access the necessary inputs reliably, both on a per-unit cost basis and from secure suppliers, should be a focus of any broader quantum strategy.

Collaboration with allies — especially Five Eyes and Indo-Pacific partners — should anchor America’s quantum strategy…The answer is not isolation, but strategic primacy: The United States should lead core initiatives while engaging partners as integrated contributors. This strengthens the U.S. industrial base, secures decision-making authority, and ensures alliances complement, not replace, American technological leadership.”

Read the full piece in War on the Rocks.

Controlling excitons

University of Michigan engineers developed a first-of-its-kind nanostructure that can control and direct the flow of excitons at room temperature.

“You can see the limits of electronics being reached now with AI and other demanding computations consuming energy and generating heat like crazy. If large processing centers were instead powered by excitonics, you wouldn’t have this huge energy consumption anymore,” said Michigan’s Mack Kira, who led the research.

This work was published in ACS Nano.

Quantum materials’ economic potential

MIT researchers developed a system for evaluating quantum materials’ potential for scalable commercial success. Their framework combines a material’s quantum behavior with its cost, supply chain resilience, environmental footprint, and other factors. The researchers used it to evaluate over 16,000 materials and identified 31 material candidates that achieved an optimal balance of quantum functionality and high-potential impact, according to an MIT announcement.

This work was published in Materials Today.

Signal cryptography

Signal, the secure messaging platform, published a description of recent updates to its encryption protocol, marking what Ars Technica called “nothing short of a triumph.” The overhaul uses ML-KEM-768, an implementation of the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm that was picked by NIST as one of its post quantum cryptography algorithms last year.

Read Signal’s extensive post on the updates.

Quickbits

• Emission of nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond shaped by topological photonic waveguide modes (Nature Nanotech)

• Giant photoconductance at infinite-layer nickelate/SrTiO₃ interfaces via an optically induced high-mobility electron gas (Nature Materials)

• Continuous time crystal coupled to a mechanical mode as a cavity-optomechanics-like platform (Nature Communications)

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.