outreach
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A team player: Puzzle enthusiast Wei-Hwa Huang donates $2.5 million to LabEscape
From the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Puzzle enthusiast Wei-Hwa Huang donates $2.5 million donation to LabEscape, a quantum-themed escape room created by UIUC’s Paul Kwiat. The funds will allow UIUC's Department of Physics’ escape room to establish a new space in Chicago and expand its impact and outreach mission. Read More
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Untangling quantum mechanics with Paul Kwiat of LabEscape
From the Reality Escape Pod: UIUC's Paul Kwiat talks about quantum information and what went into creating LabEscape, the first science-based escape room. Read More
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Break Through Tech Chicago expands with semester-long consultancy
From UIC Today: This summer, a team of University of Illinois Chicago students is working with Argonne National Laboratory’s Quantum Foundry and Q-NEXT to tackle machine automation for quantum applications. The effort is part of Break Through Tech, a national initiative to achieve gender equity in technology. Read More
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Quantum-themed LabEscape escape room a hit at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo
The Q-NEXT quantum center brings the world’s only science-themed escape room to the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, exposing hundreds of entertainment aficionados to the joys of science through puzzlement and play. Read More
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Chloe Washabaugh creates designer molecules for the quantum future
Q-NEXT collaborator and UChicago grad student Chloe Washabaugh creates high-performance qubits from designer molecules. Not only is she expanding the applications of quantum devices, but she’s also working to attract a diverse audience to quantum. Read More
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Exploring the real science behind 'Ant Man'
From Fox 32 Chicago: David Awschalom walks through the real science behind “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” in this 4-minute segment. Read More
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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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Silicon Chip Offers New Way to Probe Quantum Materials in Strong Magnetic Fields
Scientists have created a silicon chip that can detect the electrical behavior of very small materials by using very high-frequency waves. The chip is made only from silicon and other non-superconducting materials and still performs very well when cooled from room temperature down to about 4 Kelvin. Read More
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Making quantum bits ready to use again much sooner
Scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Intel have found that a simple electrical pulse can quickly push a quantum dot qubit out of a latched state and return it to its starting condition with very high reliability. 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
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Uncovering the hidden disorder in silicon quantum computers
From the U.S. Department of Energy: Q-NEXT researchers map the variation in materials to the atom level to scale up silicon qubits Read More
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Color centers in high-purity diamond
Researchers mapped how electron irradiation makes defects inside diamond, finding that creating more vacancies does not always produce more NV centers. Too many vacancies can form unwanted defects. This result can inform advances in quantum sensing. Read More
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Containing multitudes: SLAC scientist collaborates to create scalable qubits
At SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Q-NEXT collaborator Shannon Harvey develops quantum dots — a mass-producible type of qubit. Driven by curiosity about nature and how things work, Harvey draws on her facility for working at the nanoscale. Read More