Dartmouth Engineering to Lead $2.7M DOE Quantum Computing Grant

(InsideHPC) Funded by a $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Dartmouth Engineering Professor Geoffroy Hautier will lead a three-year, multi-institutional effort to identify qbits, a basic unit of quantum information, to transform and advance quantum computing. The team aims to build a database of viable qbits, which can store information in their spin, by analyzing defects in solids.
“This is a very exciting time for quantum information science research. There has been very compelling work in the last decade showing that defects in solids are viable qbits and could be the basic units for future quantum computers, but there is still not a perfect ‘quantum defect,’” said Hautier, Principal Investigator on the grant and the Hodgson Family Associate Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth. “We are convinced that our approach will lead to important findings.”
Previously, quantum defects have been identified on a case-by-case basis, but with the DOE funding, the researchers will use high-throughput computing to accelerate the search for these defects, build a database, and then experiment with and further test the most promising materials. As the database grows, the researchers intend to use machine learning to additionally quicken the screening process.