The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will receive more than $11 million in DOE funding over the course of three years as part of a series of research grants for quantum information science.

The award will fund four major projects. Two of the projects will study the science behind creating and manipulating quantum information. The first involves creating quantum bits using single photons and studying the transfer of information between different types of quantum bits. This research will drive the development of next-generation tools for studying the interaction and manipulation of quantum bits at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials.

The second project, a collaboration between Argonne, Fermilab, and the University of Chicago, establishes a 30-mile optical fiber link between Argonne and Fermilab for studying quantum entanglement, the actions of two or more particles whose behavior cannot be described independently even when the particles are separated by a large distance.

“Creating and controlling quantum-entangled states of matter beyond laboratory settings will provide a powerful research platform to explore fundamentally new methods of processing information,” said David Awschalom, senior scientist at Argonne.

The other two projects involve high-energy physics. One seeks to establish new ways of doing quantum-enhanced precision measurements for potential applications such as atomic clocks, gravitational wave detection, quantum imaging, and magnetometry. The other attempts to develop a new detection technology to identify and detect potential candidates for dark matter.