Earlier this year the QUIEST Center announced its first call for seed project proposals to fund and foster cutting-edge quantum research collaborations that address the Center’s priority research areas:

  • Materials for QUIEST – Synthesis, characterization, and optimization of materials for the storage, manipulation, or transduction of quantum information.
  • Quantum Devices – Design and realization of new quantum processors, quantum sensors, and quantum interconnects, especially in combination with integrated electronics and photonics architectures.
  • Quantum Systems – Theory of quantum information processing, new architectures for intermediate-scale and fault-tolerant quantum processors, and quantum networking.
  • QUIEST Impact – Optimization and application of quantum sensors for materials science, chemistry, biology, and medicine; the use of quantum computers for materials design and data science.

In response to this call, the Center received nine strong proposals from multi-investigator faculty teams across the Penn School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Arts and Sciences. After careful evaluation by a special committee, two of these teams were awarded funding to pursue their research proposals over the course of one year.

Bo Zhen (Physics), Anthony Sigillito (ESE), and James Aguirre (Physics & Astronomy) are working together to develop a fundamentally new type of quantum spectrometers, operating at the single photon level, for astronomy and material research. The device will be based on gate-controllable Si quantum dots, drawing expertises from quantum engineering, electromagnetic engineering, and astronomical spectroscopy.

Steve Zdancewic (CIS) and Gushu Li (CIS, ESE) are investigating designing formalized quantum software infrastructure to accommodate the ever-evolving quantum hardware with sufficient usability, compilation optimization, and correctness guarantee.

The QUIEST Center remains grateful for the strong response to this call from all teams who submitted proposals and looks forward to seeing the progression of these exciting projects. Moving forward the Center hopes to continue to expand its support for quantum research collaborations here at Penn with future seed cycles and additional funds.