In the News
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The breakthrough quantum sensor that sees inside your cells, with Peter Maurer
From the Big Brains podcast: University of Chicago's Peter Maurer talks about how he and his colleagues made the breakthrough discovery of turning a protein found in living cells into a first-of-its-kind biological qubit. He also chats about how quantum systems could be used detect diseases earlier and track how they evolve in our bodies. Read More
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Jelena Vučković and the photonic chip revolution: Integrating electronics with photonics
From SPIE: SPIE writes about Stanford University's Jelena Vučković and her pioneering work to integrate photonics with fiber-optic networks to advance quantum communication. Read More
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Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year in physics for 2025 revealed
From Physics World: University of Chicago's David Awschalom and Peter Maurer are on Physics World’s top 10 breakthroughs of the year for designing a protein qubit that can be used as a magnetic field sensor inside living cells. Read More
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Jeffrey Larson brings math to the frontiers of science
From Argonne National Laboratory: Whether he’s optimizing fusion reactors or mentoring future scientists, Argonne mathematician Jeffrey Larson thrives on turning complex challenges into elegant solutions. Read More
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Patrusky Lecture 2025: David Awschalom on quantum science in Chicago
From the Chicago Association of Science Writers: In the 13th Patrusky Lecture, presented at ScienceWriters2025 in Chicago on Nov. 8, 2025, David Awschalom explained how technology powered by the peculiarities of quantum physics will transform how we sense, communicate and compute, likely in ways we can't yet imagine. The talk followed the eighth annual Chicago Quantum Summit and featured the latest updates in research, commercial ventures and workforce changes that are defining how this revolutionary technology will intersect with society. Read More
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When will quantum technologies become part of everyday life?
From the Chicago Quantum Exchange: In a new paper, scientists from UChicago and universities in the US and EU look to computing’s past to chart quantum’s future. Their conclusion: the technology is maturing rapidly, and the next challenges are related to scaling. Read More
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Chicago's quantum computing center a benefit of tolerance
From the Chicago Sun-Times: Q-NEXT Chief Science Officer David Awschalom talks with the Chicago Sun-Times about quantum encryption, computing and the growing ecosystem in the Midwest. Read More
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New AI method predicts properties of quantum orbitals with intuitive speed
From the University of Chicago: One of the primary research goals of scientist Laura Gagliardi's group at the University of Chicago has been to automate the analysis of molecular orbitals — the quantum-level electron structures critical for understanding bonding and reactivity. This critical area of research is now receiving a powerful boost from research on the Cartesian Equivariant Orbital Network, a new AI tool developed by Daniel King, now a fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Read More
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Dream of quantum internet inches closer after breakthrough helps beam information over fiber-optic networks
From Live Science: Built from a single erbium atom, a hybrid quantum bit encodes data magnetically and beams it through fiber-optic wavelengths. Read More
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Spin qubits: sensing heartbeats to dark matter — with Argonne National Laboratory
From the Post Quantum World podcast: The word “foundry” might make you think of large machines pouring metal into molds, but Argonne National Lab has a Quantum Foundry that implants individual atoms, like silicon, into materials such as diamond. The resulting spin qubits are optically active and can use photons to communicate. We can expect spin qubits to help interconnect systems, which could help us achieve distributed quantum computing, but they also could be used for everything from room-temperature biological sensors to durable, space-based dark matter detectors. Join host Konstantinos Karagiannis for a cosmic chat with Benjamin Pingault from Argonne National Laboratory. Read More
News and features
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David Awschalom wins global Breakthrough of the Year award
David Awschalom, Q-NEXT Chief Science Officer and the Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics at the University of Chicago, received the prestigious Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year in Physical Sciences for a pioneering body of work that broke the wall between quantum technology, molecules, and proteins. Read More
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Helium lifts new quantum computing concept
A team led by Jacob Covey, who is part of Q-NEXT and is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, laid out a new concept that could turn helium’s light weight into the next generation of quantum computers. The design relies on helium-3, an isotope with different quantum properties than the helium-4 used to cool MRI machines and fill party balloons. Once built, the computer could use high-powered lasers as “optical tweezers” to capture and control individual atoms of helium. Read More
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Researchers make materials that support quantum technology
Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who are part of Q-NEXT are engineering material systems that support quantum technology. Chris Anderson and his team are developing materials for quantum transduction — the conversion of quantum information from one form to another. Elizabeth Goldschmidt, Daniel Shoemaker, and colleagues are developing quantum memory technology that stores quantum information for extended periods of time. Read More
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Q-NEXT-developed open-source software receives 2026 R&D 100 award
SeQUeNCe, a free, open-source software developed by Argonne scientists with Q-NEXT support, is one of seven Argonne projects that received a 2026 R&D 100 Award. The SeQUeNCe software lets researchers test how quantum networks might work before building them. Read More
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Researchers generate spontaneous magnons that synchronize with external signals
Researchers at Argonne and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign demonstrate a method for generating stable ripples in magnetic materials called magnons. The work opens avenues for information processing in microelectronics and quantum devices. Read More