Quantum Foundry to Develop Materials for Quantum-Based Technologies

The University of California, Santa Barbara will be the home of the nation’s first Quantum Foundry, a center for developing materials and devices for quantum-information-based technologies.

Research at the Quantum Foundry will focus on three main areas. One area of focus, natively entangled materials, will work to identify and characterize materials that intrinsically host anyon excitations and long-range entangled states with topological protection against decoherence. These materials could include new intrinsic topological superconductors and quantum spin liquids, as well as materials that enable topological quantum computing.

Professors Stephen Wilson and Ania Bleszynski Jayich will co-direct the new Quantum Foundry at UC Santa Barbara. Courtesy of Matt Perko.

Another research area will be interfaced topological states, which will have researchers seeking to create and control protected quantum states in hybrid materials. A third area of focus will be coherent quantum interfaces, for which the concentration will be on engineering materials with localized quantum states that can be interfaced with various other quantum degrees of freedom (e.g., photons or phonons) in order to distribute quantum information while retaining robust coherence.

An initial six-year, $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund the Quantum Foundry. A significant portion of the NSF grant is designated to develop an infrastructure for quantum research, both to purchase required tools and equipment and to fabricate new tools necessary to grow and characterize the quantum states in the new materials.

Industry collaborations are part of the Foundry project. The 10 inaugural industrial partners are Microsoft, Google LLC, IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HRL Laboratories LLC, Northrop Grumman, Bruker, SomaLogic Inc., NVision Imaging Technologies GmbH, and Anstrom Sciences Inc.