Three Argonne Projects Garner DOE Funding

Three projects at Argonne National Laboratory have received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy in a push to lay the groundwork for breakthroughs in quantum information science. The awards are part of a $61 million investment in quantum science and engineering.

QuEEN-M
Using resources at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a team of researchers led by Jianguo Wen will develop a microscope to enable the visualization of quantum emitters the size of a single atom, or a few nanometers across. This will enable researchers to precisely measure an emitter’s features and optimize it for quantum networks. The tool, the Quantum Emitter Electron Nanomaterial Microscope, or QuEEN-M, combines recent developments in electron beam pulsers to create new capabilities that can be applied to a wide array of scientific and technical problems in quantum information science.

AQuISS Lab
A team of researchers led by Jeffrey Guest will develop the Atomic Quantum Information Surface Science (AQuISS) Lab to better understand and control defects near the surface of crystals, associated with quantum information storage through the property of spin. The lab’s establishment will enable the team to learn how to manipulate surface spin sites to better hold and manipulate quantum information. The team will also seek to develop new materials and spins on crystal surfaces, improving them for quantum information storage and processing.

Reliable and scalable information distribution in quantum networks
Argonne scientist Martin Suchara and colleagues at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will design a quantum internet protocol that manages different types of quantum information encoding. They will also examine how quantum states are transformed from one type into another inside a quantum network with multiple senders and recipients. Their studies will enable them to improve the flow of information through a network, using the Argonne quantum network as a test site.