University of Minnesota receives federal grant to study disorder in quantum systems

The University of Minnesota announced that it has received $1 million over the next four years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for fundamental quantum research that will help develop materials that could someday be used in quantum computing.

The team, consisting of mathematician Svitlana Mayboroda at the University of Minnesota and materials scientists Jim Speck and Claude Weisbuch at the University of California – Santa Barbara, is one of only 25 nationwide to receive a grant under NSF’s Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering-Transformational Advances in Quantum Systems (RAISE-TAQS) effort that will help enable the United States to lead a new quantum technology revolution.

The objective of this grant is to test whether the electronic quantum states in gallium nitride (GaN)-based alloys, which are localized due to the natural disorder of the alloy, can be used as a possible solution for being the quantum “bits” of a future quantum computer. “Basically, we are testing the capability of this solid state material to be the ‘hardware’ of a quantum computer.”

The RAISE grant program aims to encourage researchers to submit interdisciplinary research projects that pursue exploratory, cutting-edge concepts.