WASHINGTON, D.C, February 01, 2024 -- The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — today launched a new quantum computing program aimed at overcoming the field’s next major challenge en route to its promise of solving physics, chemistry, and mathematics problems that defy computation by classical computers.

IARPA’s new program, Entangled Logical Qubits (ELQ), will provide the Intelligence Community insights into quantum computing by illuminating the complexities of maintaining error correction and fault tolerance in operations between logical qubits (LQs) — the basic units of quantum information in the paradigm of universal fault-tolerant quantum computing (UFTQC). Researchers will build, operate, and entangle LQs in demonstrations of quantum teleportation, or moving quantum information from one LQ to another, ideally without error.

“To the noise and errors that plague computing with physical qubits, UFTQC offers an antidote,” said ELQ Program Manager, Dr. Michael Di Rosa. “IARPA’s previous quantum programs showed that the fundamentals behind UFTQC work in practice, and now we are taking the next significant step toward a UFTQC future through ELQ and its success.”

Through a Broad Agency Announcement, IARPA awarded ELQ research contracts to address the range of program objectives to four teams that are led by investigators at:

• ETH Zurich
• Harvard University
• University of Innsbruck
• University of Sydney

Test and evaluation work for the program will be provided by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories.

ELQ will also use government-furnished capabilities from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Sandia National Laboratories.

IARPA invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of the agencies and disciplines in the Intelligence Community.