Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,900 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. See something interesting? Be sure to share it.

Stanford physicists demonstrated a cavity-array microscope that can read out the state of individual neutral atom-based qubits in an array. Most approaches measure signals from multiple qubits collectively, rather than individually, which limits addressability, parallelism, and scalability at larger sizes. By giving each atom its own optical cavity, this work points toward architectures where scaling does not come at the expense of readability and control.

“Until now, there hasn’t been a practical way to do that at scale because atoms just don’t emit light fast enough, and on top of that, they spew it out in all directions. An optical cavity can efficiently guide emitted light toward a particular direction, and now we’ve found a way to equip each atom in a quantum computer within its own individual cavity,” Stanford’s Jon Simon said in an announcement.

This work was published in Nature.

IonQ pushed back on claims that it didn’t disclose that most of its reported revenue from 2022 to 2024 came from congressional earmarks that the Pentagon never asked for and that were often eliminated without the full funding being delivered.

The allegations were raised by Wolfpack Research, which has shorted IonQ stock and thus stands to gain from decreased share prices, and covered by Fortune magazine. In a statement, IonQ said that the report “contains false, misleading, and unsubstantiated claims from a short-seller.”

“Wolfpack estimates that of the $75.6 million in Pentagon contracts IonQ said it had booked in 2024, only $21 million was fully funded,” according to Fortune. For quantum companies straddling government R&D and commercialization, how revenue is classified and whether it ends up funded matters to investors, partners, and customers.

Barron’s, meanwhile, reported that the sale of an IonQ system to a Tennessee municipal power company was funded largely by IonQ itself, with the remainder coming from congressional earmarks.

Read the full Fortune article and download the Wolfpack report.

Researchers at Columbia and the University of Texas observed a superfluid transition into a “what appears to be a supersolid” for the first time, according to Columbia’s Cory Dean. Distinct from previous efforts, this work is a solid state experiment that does not rely on optical devices.

Supersolids show the rigid, ordered crystalline structure of a solid, while maintaining the frictionless flow of a superfluid. Demonstrating this transition in a controllable system opens new ground for exploring exotic phases and collective quantum behavior.

This work was published in Nature.

CORRECTION: THIS STORY PREVIOUSLY MISSTATED THE NATURE OF THE EXPERIMENT. THE WORK IS NOT BASED ON OPTICAL DEVICES.

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab synthesized a magnetic honeycomb of potassium cobalt arsenate, allowing the most detailed characterization of the material ever. Researchers believe these magnetic honeycombs could be tuned chemically or with a strong magnetic field to produce quantum spin liquids and, perhaps, the Majorana particles used in some quantum computing platforms.

This work was published in Inorganic Chemistry.

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.