Who made the cut? NSF names final contenders for $60 million testbed projects

Every campus needs a winter break. The next issue of Quantum Campus will publish on January 17, 2025.

Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology from university campuses. We publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from researchers across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

National Quantum Virtual Laboratory

The National Science Foundation announced six new pilot projects that will be part of its National Quantum Virtual Laboratory. They join five other teams announced in August that are eligible to compete in the latest NSF NQVL solicitation, which will fund the design and implementation of quantum testbeds. NSF plans to award up to eight design awards of up to $4 million each and six implementation awards of up to $60 million each in the coming years.

The six new projects are:

• Quantum Blueprint: Optimizing Analog Pathways in Diverse Scientific Realms (Q-BLUE), led by Iowa State.

• Attosecond Synchronized Photonic Entanglement Network (ASPEN-Net), led by University of Oregon.

• Erasure Qubits and Dynamic Circuits for Quantum Advantage (ERASE), led by Yale.

• Accelerating Fault-Tolerant Quantum Logic (FTL), led by UCLA.

• Distributed-Entanglement Quantum Sensing of Chemical Properties (DQS-CP), led by Ohio State.

• Quantum Photonic Integration and Deployment (QuPID), led by University of Michigan. (Michigan shared details of their project in a news release.)

Atomic spray painting

A team from Penn State created a ferroelectric potassium niobate thin film using a molecular beam epitaxy-based strain tuning process that they liken to “atomic spray painting.” The process alters a material’s properties by layering two materials of slightly different sizes to stretch or compress its atomic unit cell, the repeating motif of atoms that builds up its crystal structure.

With this technique, “[t]he ferroelectric performance of potassium niobate can be remarkably enhanced even surpassing those of lead titanate or lead zirconate titanate which are considered to be industrial standard levels of ferroelectricity for device applications,” according to Sankalpa Hazra, a PhD candidate on the project. These improvements would make the material a safer and more environmentally friendly alternative to lead-based materials in advanced medical and quantum devices.

The work was published in Advanced Materials.

Chip-scale, ultra-low-linewidth lasers

Daniel Blumenthal’s lab at University of California Santa Barbara designed a matchbook-sized, ultra-low-linewidth self-injection locked 780 nanometer laser of the sort necessary for applications like atomic clocks and quantum gates.

The team combined a commercially available Fabry-Perot laser diode, highest-quality factor resonators, and some of the world’s lowest-loss waveguides fabricated in Blumenthal’s lab on a silicon nitride platform. Their device outperformed some tabletop lasers, as well as previously reported integrated lasers, by four orders of magnitude in key metrics like frequency noise and linewidth — at a fraction of the cost.

The work was published in Scientific Reports. 

Quantum methods for grid management

Rochester Institute of Technology’s Bing Yan recently earned a grant from Independent System Operator-New England, a non-profit energy provider, to develop the advanced quantum-based optimization models needed to manage the modern electrical grid. Her work focuses on what is known as the “unit commitment problem,” wherein system operators determine which power plants should run to meet demand. Bing also earned an NSF CAREER award earlier in the year for related research.

“As the dynamics on the power grid increase, solving Unit Commitment becomes increasingly critical, a task classical computing struggles to address efficiently within practical time frames. Going forward, the future grid is anticipated to be more stochastic, or randomly determined, requiring more measurement and data processing efforts for reliable and resilient grid maintenance,” she said in an RIT news announcement.

Quickbits

• MIT team measures the geometry of electrons in solids at the quantum level in Nature Physics

• Miami University board of trustees approves quantum computing major

• EE Times gets more researchers’ takes on Google’s Willow chip

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