Today, Yunger Halpern’s work as an award-winning physicist also straddles two centuries and two worlds – thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.

U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) and U.S. Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) today introduced bipartisan legislation to expand the United States’ capacity to invest in quantum information science and research and development (R&D) through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As quantum science, engineering, and technology advances, the DOE Quantum Leadership Act of 2025 would reinvigorate R&D projects at DOE by authorizing more than $2.5 billion in funding over the next five years—well above the $625 million for DOE-related programs laid out in the now-expiredNational Quantum Initiative Act of 2018. The DOE Quantum Leadership Act would also provide DOE the authority to expand its current quantum R&D initiatives.

Qubits—the fundamental units of quantum information—drive entire tech sectors. Among them, superconducting qubits could be instrumental in building a large-scale quantum computer, but they rely on electrical signals and are difficult to scale. In a breakthrough, a team of physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) has achieved a fully optical readout of superconducting qubits, pushing the technology beyond its current limitations. Their findings were published in Nature Physics.

Two researchers from the Leibniz University Hannover demonstrate a dynamically adaptable, resource-minimised quantum key distribution exploiting the photon colours for the first time.

Quandela, the European leader in photonic quantum computing, announces a major breakthrough for the sector in a scientific paper describing a reduction by a factor of 100,000 in the number of components required for fault-tolerant calculations. Quandela’s hybrid approach, based on a technology that generates photonic qubits with unprecedented efficiency from artificial atoms (semiconductor quantum emitters), should enable the company to accelerate the scaling-up of its quantum computers.

It is difficult to imagine a world more dynamic and at the same time more inaccessible than the inside of a proton. The complex interactions of its constituent quarks, gluons and the constantly ‘churning’ sea of virtual particles can now be coherently described thanks to the skilful use of the tools of quantum information theory and the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. The new, more than hitherto universal formalism has made it possible, for the first time, to explain data from all available measurements related to the scattering of secondary particles produced during deeply inelastic collisions between electrons and protons. The team responsible for the achievement include theorists from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and Stony Brook University (SBU) in New York, Mexico's Universidad de las Americas Puebla (UDLAP) and the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow.

Unisys, a leading global technology solutions provider, has joined the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), launching a partnership aimed at driving industry-specific applications for quantum technology, developing top-tier quantum talent, and strengthening the Illinois-Wisconsin-Indiana quantum ecosystem.

Researchers at the University of Chicago unveil insights into random quantum circuits, exploring the speed at which random circuits scramble information. These findings, to be presented at the Quantum Information Processing Conference, are crucial for understanding quantum supremacy experiments as well as the future of quantum cryptography.

A recent study led by quantum researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory proved popular among the science community interested in building a more reliable quantum network.

In a groundbreaking achievement for quantum technologies, researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, have created a functional quantum register using the atoms inside a semiconductor quantum dot.