Yawen Peng, a PhD candidate in electrical and computer engineering, is the first recipient of the new Samit & Reshma Sharma foundation scholarship, which supports Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) graduate studies with significant practical impact in quantum information research.

Quantum states can only be prepared and observed under highly controlled conditions. A research team from Innsbruck, Austria, has now succeeded in creating so-called hot Schrödinger cat states in a superconducting microwave resonator. The study, recently published in Science Advances, shows that quantum phenomena can also be observed and used in less perfect, warmer conditions.

The University of Maryland’s Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) announces the creation of a new center aimed at harnessing the potential of quantum technologies to advance national security over the next several decades. The Maryland Institute for Quantum Applications will investigate how technologies such as quantum computing, networking and sensing can lead to new strategic tools and systems designed to enhance national defense capabilities.

Nord Quantique, a leading maker of quantum computers with efficient error correction, today proudly announces it has been accepted into stage A of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI). The company is one of a handful emanating from around the world which have been accepted into this prestigious program. This acceptance is based on Nord Quantique's advanced approach to quantum error correction, which is designed to progress efficiently to utility scale. This multi-year initiative will roll out in several stages, with companies achieving certain milestones being retained for successive stages and winning contracts based on their performance.

Until now, creating quantum superpositions of ultra-cold atoms has been a real headache, too slow to be realistic in the laboratory. Researchers at the University of Liège have now developed an innovative new approach combining geometry and "quantum control", which drastically speeds up the process, paving the way for practical applications in quantum technologies.

Philip Kurian, a theoretical physicist and founding director of the Quantum Biology Laboratory (QBL) at Howard University in Washington, D.C., has used the laws of quantum mechanics, which Schrödinger postulated, and the QBL’s discovery of cytoskeletal filaments exhibiting quantum optical features, to set a drastically revised upper bound on the computational capacity of carbon-based life in the entire history of Earth. Published in Science Advances, Kurian’s latest work conjectures a relationship between this information-processing limit and that of all matter in the observable universe.

Now a team of researchers led by Mohammad Mirhosseini, assistant professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Caltech, has developed an on-chip transducer to help bridge that significant energy gap. The silicon device performs a stepwise transformation to convert microwave photons to optical photons. The work is described online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Now a team led by Nadj-Perge that includes Lingyuan Kong, AWS quantum postdoctoral scholar research associate, and other colleagues at Caltech has discovered a new superconducting state—a finding that provides a new piece of the puzzle behind this mysterious but powerful phenomenon. A paper about the work was published on March 19 in the journal Nature.

An international research team led by QuTech has realised a three-site Kitaev chain using semiconducting quantum dots coupled by superconducting segments in a hybrid InSb/Al nanowire. When comparing two-and three-site chains within the same device, they observed that extending the chain to three sites increased the stability of the zero-energy modes. This work demonstrates the scalability of quantum-dot-based Kitaev chains and their potential to host stable Majorana zero modes. The researchers published their results in Nature Nanotechnology.

A quantum physicist at Heriot-Watt University has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters.