Cornell researchers will help lead a new $27.9 million National Science Foundation institute focused on developing materials and manufacturing methods needed to build quantum processors at scale.
The five-year MARQUIS institute, led by Princeton University, is one of eight Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes announced Aug. 25. Cornell engineering professor Valla Fatemi will serve as deputy director.
Institute targets manufacturing bottleneck
MARQUIS, short for Manufacturable and Resilient superconducting Quantum Information Systems, brings together two dozen laboratories at nine institutions. Researchers will work across materials science, quantum devices and semiconductor processing while also developing education and workforce programs.
The team plans to create new ways to fabricate quantum hardware, compare competing designs and test them in mid-scale processors. Those test beds are intended to connect small academic prototypes with larger systems capable of useful quantum algorithms.
Participating institutions include Cornell, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Dartmouth, UC Santa Barbara, Michigan State, the University of Iowa and NY Creates. The advisory board includes Google Quantum AI, NVIDIA, Applied Materials and other technology organizations.
Cornell team focuses on critical junctions
Fatemi and other Cornell researchers will focus on new ways to fabricate and characterize Josephson junctions, components used in nearly all superconducting quantum bits. The field has largely relied for more than 25 years on junctions made with aluminum and aluminum oxide through a polymer stencil process.
The Cornell work will use the Cornell NanoScale Facility, Cornell Center for Materials Research and a new quantum facility being developed at Duffield Engineering. Recent work by Fatemi’s group has included semiconductor-compatible tantalum deposition and a resist-free fabrication method intended to reduce contamination.
Researchers said improving the underlying materials has become a central obstacle to scaling superconducting quantum computers.
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