The alliance is led by two of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Sandia National Laboratories – and includes experts from the University of Maryland, Duke University, Harvard University, University of Colorado Boulder, UC Berkeley, Caltech, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of New Mexico.
The aim is to identify the most impactful scientific applications that stand to benefit from quantum computing and engineer the hardware and software systems to run these applications. Using advanced hardware including superconducting circuits and naturally occurring atomic systems, the alliance will explore ways to achieve practical quantum advantage. That can be demonstrated through systems that outperform state-of-the-art classical methods for important scientific and engineering problems.
“We are at the threshold of significant advances in quantum information science. To break new ground, The Quantum Information Edge will accelerate quantum R&D by simultaneously pursuing solutions across a broad range of science and technology areas, and integrating these efforts to build working quantum computing systems that benefit the nation and science,” said Irfan Siddiqi, director of Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Quantum Testbed and a faculty scientist in the Lab’s Computational Research and Materials Sciences divisions.
The Quantum Information Edge will work on programmable quantum systems to help solve scientific problems that are far beyond the reach of today’s machines, in areas such as information processing, simulations, and metrology.
