Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 2,100 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

PsiQuantum announced this week that it finalized a $100 million award from the Department of Commerce as part of the CHIPS Act. The company also committed an undisclosed amount of funding to the project, which will focus on domestic manufacturability of high-performance optical switches, high-temperature single-photon detectors, and advanced packaging approaches. GlobalFoundries will collaborate with PsiQuantum on these components and techniques.

Read the announcement from PsiQuantum.

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Engineers at Harvard demonstrated all-mechanical coherence protection of a silicon-vacancy spin in diamond using a continuous acoustic field, rather than the microwave pulses that are typically used. Optical initialization, quantum operations, and readout were all possible when passing quantum information among qubit nodes. The approach could ultimately lead to high-fidelity, phonon-mediated quantum gates and on-chip quantum phononic networks.

“We are solving two problems,” Eliza Cornell, now a postdoc at Boston University, said. “We want the spin to have strong interaction with phonons, and we want the spin to have a long coherence time. Our paper demonstrates a method of extending the coherence time that is compatible with the silicon-vacancy center being in a cavity.”

This work was published in Nature Physics.

In a commentary from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Fellow Hideki Tomoshige outlined supply-chain risks for the raw materials involved in quantum computing. Tomoshige discussed the helium-3, helium-4, elemental silicon, III-V semiconductors, diamond, aluminum, and rare earth metals. He also covered the cost and resource implications of a demand surge, using the current AI boom as an object lesson.

Read Tomoshige’s commentary. Read a report from Oak Ridge that further explores quantum’s energy and physical resource needs, published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition in June.

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