US DOE Awards $4 Million to University of Rochester’s ‘Extreme Quantum Team’

(Rochester.edu) The US Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded the University of Rochester $4 million for research in the growing, multidisciplinary field of Quantum Information Science (QIS), which is viewed as the foundation for the next generation of computing and information processing. This QIS research at Rochester is being supported for three years by the US Department of Energy Office of Science, through its Fusion Energy Sciences Program (FES).
The U of Rocheter’s “Extreme Quantum Team” will focus their research on tuning the energy density of matter into a high-energy-density (HED) quantum regime to understand extremes of quantum matter behavior, properties and phenomena. Since the early days of quantum mechanics, the realm of quantum matter has been limited to low temperatures, restricting the breadth of quantum phenomena that could be exploited and explored. The project will take advantage of new developments in HED science that enable the controlled manipulation of pressure, temperature and composition, opening the way to revolutionary quantum states of matter. For example, this team will use compression experiments to tune the distance between atoms thereby unlocking a new quantum behavior at unprecedentedly high temperatures, transferring quantum phenomena to the macroscale, and opening the potential for hot superconductors, superconducting-superfluid plasma, transparent aluminum, insulating plasma and potentially more.
“We are very pleased that the DOE has chosen to invest in Rochester’s high-energy density research programs and the groundbreaking fusion research conducted at our Laboratory for Laser Energetics,” said Rob Clark, University provost and senior vice president for research. “The leadership and expertise of our scientists and our state-of-the-art research tools make the University of Rochester an ideal environment to pursue advances in QIS.”