This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, which shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,900 researchers, we are always looking for news from across the country. See something interesting? Be sure to share it.

The “Ghost Murmur” was hard to ignore this week, given that the President got the ball rolling at a press conference about a recent rescue operation. The CIA reportedly used quantum sensing to help pinpoint the location of a U.S. airman downed in Iran from miles away. Sources claimed that Ghost Murmur uses quantum magnetometry and AI to isolate and locate a heartbeat’s electromagnetic signal at long distances.

But longtime national security reporter Seth Hettena said he was “calling bullshit” in his newsletter The After-Action Report. Scientific American’s Deni Ellis Béchard, meanwhile, talked to physicists around the country who are skeptical.

“People have been measuring the magnetic field of the heart for 60 years, and usually it’s done in a lab with shielding, and it’s done just a few centimeters or a couple inches from the heart, and even then you can barely record it,” biomagnetism researcher Bradley Roth told Scientific American. Magnetometry at a distance from a helicopter “would be not just a small advance, but it’d be a revolutionary advance from the state of the art.”

Union College’s Chad Orzel described all the other things the sensor would have to contend with, including “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits — whatever else is running around out there.”

Hettena pointed out that as recently as last year, DARPA’s Robust Quantum Sensors program considered merely functional helicopter-borne quantum magnetometers a prospective R&D topic.

Advanced, classified research is real. But so is physics.

Read more in Scientific American.

Virginia Tech physicists proposed a new method of designing dynamically corrected quantum gates, based on space curve quantum control. “Their solution is built on a framework that describes the shape of the pulse as something cast by a hidden geometrical structure — as if it were a shadow of a 3D object on a wall,” according to an announcement from Virginia Tech.

“The curves and corners of the invisible shape can dictate the parameters of the [electromagnetic pulses used to control qubits], like a dancer’s choreography. The Virginia Tech researchers realized that they could simply adjust the shape of a 3D space curve to design a pulse that suppressed noise errors.”

This work was published in njp Quantum Information. The team also published a software package on GitHub to facilitate space curve quantum control.

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Relying on time and frequency multiplexing techniques used to compare atomic clocks across long distances, researchers from NIST and the University of Colorado sent single-photon-level pulses carrying quantum information over more than two kilometers of noisy, telecom fiber. The team plans to use this technique to demonstrate the key components of a quantum repeater in future work, according to an announcement from Optica.

This work was published in Optica Quantum at the end of March.

Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.