The Short-Baseline Near Detector is the newest liquid-argon neutrino detector at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The SBND collaboration published their first results on Oct. 30 in arXiv and submitted to Physical Review Letters for review and publication, marking a critical demonstration of the powerful tool scientists now have at their disposal.

This result focuses on understanding how neutrinos interact with argon atoms and lays critical groundwork needed to prepare for the Fermilab-hosted Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility.

“This is a huge milestone for the collaboration,” said Afroditi Papadopoulou, a physicist at Georgia Institute of Technology and member of the SBND collaboration. “This result is going to be a stepping stone for all the analyses that will follow from this point on.”

When it comes to finding new physics, researchers rely on comparing real results to simulations of how the universe is supposed to work. One of the trickiest aspects of these detectors is modeling all the different ways a neutrino can interact with the argon atoms. This measurement also serves to shed more light on a specific subset of interactions and improve our understanding of the modeling of these processes. Future measurements will complement the picture.

“Nobody has as many statistics as we do on neutrino interactions,” said Anne Schukraft, Fermilab scientist and former SBND physics co-coordinator. “So, we’re able to measure these processes in more dimensions than other experiments because we have so much data.” 

Whereas in the past, uncertainties in the detector itself meant it was unclear whether a model was correct or not, SBND will be able to concretely indicate which models work and which do not.  Such precision is critical for determining whether neutrinos may hold the key to answering some of the biggest questions about our cosmos, like why we live in a matter-dominated universe.

DUNE at LBNF, a next-generation liquid-argon neutrino experiment, will be the most comprehensive neutrino experiment in the world, promising to revolutionize our understanding of neutrinos. And delivering an intense beam of neutrinos to the experiment by 2031 is Fermilab’s top institutional priority. SBND is key to developing the strong foundation of neutrino-argon interactions DUNE scientists will rely on to reduce uncertainties to deliver results.

Preparing a new detector

To achieve this first measurement, the SBND collaboration first had to meticulously prepare their new detector.

The collaboration detected their first neutrinos with SBND in 2024. That moment marked the beginning of a new era for the SBND collaboration. Following a dedicated campaign to calibrate all the components in the detector, SBND moved on to testing the programs needed to simulate and reconstruct neutrino interactions using real experimental data.

“A lot of our tools are based on what we have done in other experiments before us, so we are standing on the shoulders of giants,” said Schukraft. That said, “everything still has to be customized for SBND and used it in our detector for the first time.”  

Once the detector was calibrated and the tools were in place, the team could finally turn their attention to how they were going to analyze the data. 

Because each detector is a new machine and therefore slightly unique, the researchers had to determine how to select from the thousands of events occurring each day within the detector. 

Neutrinos are like ghosts entering the detector invisibly. It’s only when they interact, producing a spray of particles the detector can see, that scientists know a neutrino was ever there. Researchers work backward from those secondary particle tracks to trace back to where the neutrino interaction took place, piecing together the type of neutrino, energy and direction. This makes neutrino research a bit like detective work.

Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program detectors are all liquid-argon time projection chambers. Liquid-argon TPCs are fantastic at capturing neutrino interactions, essentially taking a 3D snapshot of the event. 

For this very first measurement, the SBND team narrowed in on event signatures with two tracks, one coming from a muon and the other from a proton. These tracks are both common and simple to identify, ensuring a strong foundation for the collaboration to build upon with future analyses.

“Because of the proximity of the detector to the neutrino source, we have fairly high statistics,” said Papadopoulou. “We can leverage that to choose the best of the best events in our detector.”

Even after narrowing down to the best interactions, SBND could isolate 12,000 initial events with a 91% selection purity. This is a significant increase from the selection purity and efficiency of previous experiments. 

This high purity gives the SBND collaboration an extremely high level of confidence in their results. “I think that really provides a clear path forward on the next generation measurements,” said Mun Jung, who was the main analyzer for this result while a graduate student at University of Chicago.

“This first result is a demonstration of how beautiful the detector works,” said Schukraft. 

An unsolved mystery

Beyond taking neutrino-argon interaction measurements, SBND will also play a critical role as the near detector in the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program at Fermilab. Along with MicroBooNE and the SBN Program’s far detector ICARUS, SBND is looking to shed light on whether additional types of neutrinos exist.

Neutrinos come in three known flavors: electron, muon and tau. One of the strangest facets of neutrinos is that they oscillate between the different types. Scientists understand how many of each type of neutrino should be present at different distances from a neutrino source very well. Yet a few decades ago, two different experiments recorded unexpected ratios, suggesting that neutrinos might be oscillating into yet-to-be-discovered types. 

MicroBooNE recently placed strong limits on a leading explanation for these unusual observations, but the mystery still remains.   

To solve it, the SBND and ICARUS detectors were installed at the ideal location — 110 meters and 600 meters, respectively, from the neutrino beam to see any new neutrino oscillation phenomena. 

Although SBND is not publishing results about this mystery quite yet, this measurement marks a critical demonstration of the full power of the near detector as the SBN Program prepares for its first joint measurement. 

SBND is building upon a 70-year legacy of neutrino research and is poised to bring scientists one step closer to unraveling some of the mysteries surrounding these elusive particles.

“We’re really demonstrating the iterative advancements of these measurements,” said Jung. “We have spent years building and carefully planning for analysis on SBND. It’s exciting to see the start of a very rich physics program for our collaboration.”

“We are at a place now where the project is gaining a lot of forward momentum,” said Jim Kerby, LBNF/DUNE-US project director for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “The past decade has seen serious planning, preparation, excavation and outfitting of the underground space. Now the steel is actually here and being sent underground to form the cryostats. DUNE is here. It is a reality.”

DUNE is the largest U.S. Department of Energy science experiment on American soil and an international collaboration hosted by Fermilab. The excavation work for DUNE’s enormous underground footprint began in June 2020 and was completed in 2024. The project has since been recognized by the Underground Construction Association for its outstanding engineering and design.

Demonstrating the significance of international partners for the experiment, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has contributed more than 5,000 tons of structural steel that will form the cryostats for DUNE’s detector modules.

“This is the first time that CERN has provided infrastructure to a project outside of Europe, so that in itself says something about how important DUNE is to the future of science,” Kerby said. “We fully intend to show that the investment of our partners will be worth it to them.”

The work being done to construct the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility will enable DUNE to begin its quest to unlock secrets behind neutrinos — often referred to as “ghost particles” because they rarely interact with other matter particles. Neutrinos make things even more interesting by changing between three varieties or what physicists call “flavors.” Thanks to several unique aspects of its design, DUNE will enable researchers not only to advance our understanding of neutrinos but also to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model. The experiment could potentially help explain why we live in a matter-dominated universe.

Building on a legacy of neutrino discovery

Neutrino science has a storied 70-year history, with groundbreaking discoveries coming from global experiments such as the Homestake experiment in the United States, Super-Kamiokande in Japan and SNO in Canada. Now the Sanford Underground Research Facility, the site of the former Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota, will be the far site for DUNE.

While DUNE will be the largest neutrino experiment of its kind, it is the latest in a history of neutrino experiments hosted by Fermilab, including MiniBooNE, MicroBooNE, SBND, ICARUS, MINOS, MINERvA, NOvA and DONUT.

As the DUNE at LBNF project moves into its next phase, members of the collaboration are eager to begin taking data — anticipated to start in early 2030 — to continue this legacy of discovery.

Chris Marshall, a University of Rochester researcher and DUNE collaborator who co-leads the experiment’s physics program, believes DUNE’s capabilities will enable researchers to explore deeper questions, including the ordering of neutrino masses, the origin of neutrino mixing, and whether our understanding of neutrinos within the Standard Model is complete.

“In the current three-flavor framework, we’ve been able to measure most of the parameters of neutrinos based on our understanding of the Standard Model,” said Marshall. “But we’re still not sure whether this is the right description of nature.”

DUNE’s unique design holds several key ingredients for successful discovery: the most intense beam of neutrinos in the world, a very long baseline, cutting-edge liquid-argon technology and a movable near detector.

Intense beamline and a long baseline

DUNE will be powered in large part by an upgrade currently being undertaken at the Fermilab Accelerator Complex, called the Proton Improvement Plan-II project. Once operational, the PIP-II linear accelerator will be used to generate this most-intense-in-the-world neutrino beam for the experiment. And just like DUNE at LBNF, PIP-II has important international partners contributing.

“PIP-II at Fermilab is the engine that will drive the LBNF,” Marshall said.

The beam of neutrinos from the Fermilab Accelerator Complex will be sent along DUNE’s long baseline — 800 miles through the Earth from Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, to the Sanford Underground Research Facility. And because neutrinos harmlessly travel through matter, no tunnel is required for their journey.

“This distance from Fermilab to SURF gives us sensitivity to the way that matter affects neutrino oscillations, and we might see something that deviates from the Standard Model of physics,” Marshall said.

The PIP-II team recently installed the first beamline component for the accelerator, the radio-frequency quadrupole, which will focus the accelerator’s beam. And soon, they will begin commissioning the cryogenic system that will cool the superconducting accelerator. “It’s an important year for the PIP-II project,” said Cristian Boffo, PIP-II project director. “We are making lots of important progress and building on our years of momentum to deliver this vital instrument to power DUNE.”

Liquid-argon technology

In addition to the power of PIP-II, the liquid-argon time projection chamber technology employed by DUNE’s detectors will provide researchers with more granular, precise imaging of neutrino interactions than other experiments.

The beam’s broad range of energies will give researchers more ways to investigate the physics of neutrinos, but accurately measuring the neutrino energy will require reconstructing these interactions as precisely as possible.

Liquid-argon time projection chamber technology used in the detectors enables DUNE to provide those reconstructions reliably and with unprecedented clarity. The technology and its potential for scalability have been successfully demonstrated at overwhelming levels in the past decade, from the pioneering ICARUS experiment to the massive ProtoDUNEs — one kiloton-scale prototype detectors at CERN. “The imaging capability is really important for measuring all of the stuff that comes out of these interactions,” Marshall said.

DUNE detectors near and far

Once completed, DUNE will have two detectors: one at the near site on the Fermilab campus and the other at the far site at the SURF.

The near detector at Fermilab measures neutrinos before they have time to oscillate into other flavors, enabling DUNE scientists to understand precisely the composition of the beam. Within DUNE’s ND-LAr — which stands for near detector-liquid argon — is a movable detector offering a higher level of precision measurement and a new way to fully characterize the beam. The near detector’s design will allow researchers to ​better understand how neutrinos interact with matter across different energies, which in turn allows for more accurate measurements of oscillations. Because neutrinos change their flavor as they travel, the energy spectrum of each neutrino flavor at the far detector will be difficult to predict.

“We want a movable near detector because we want to address a really challenging problem once you get to making precision measurements, which is that the the energy spectra of the neutrinos at the near and far detectors are not the same,” Marshall said.

DUNE’s massive far detector modules at SURF will be the largest and most advanced detectors of their kind. Each will be filled with 17,000 tons of liquid argon and then chilled to about minus 363 degrees Fahrenheit. To ensure the detectors perform as they should, two ProtoDUNEs are demonstrating the technology that will go into the facility.

For instance, anode plane assemblies, or APAs, will be installed inside DUNE’s detectors. These screen-door-like panels, each measuring 20 feet by 7 1/2 feet, will be stacked inside the detectors and allow researchers to construct 3D images of neutrino interactions. Bare APA frames are being manufactured in the United Kingdom and then shipped to DUNE’s two production locations — one in the United Kingdom at the Daresbury Laboratory of the U.K. Science and Technology Facilities Council, and the other in the United States at the University of Chicago. Here, they are inspected, cleaned and outfitted with the wiring that will enable them to become fully functional. APA components have recently arrived in South Dakota, where they will be stored until they are ready for installation.

Path to discovery

Once these detector components are installed, DUNE’s key design features will provide the ability to measure all of the oscillation parameters of neutrinos at once, in one experiment, with no ambiguity and at high precision.

Additionally, DUNE will have the potential to reach five-sigma measurements — measurements so precise that there is only a probability of about 0.00003% that new scientific results could arise by chance.

“What we call ‘five-sigma’ is really the gold standard for discovery-level research,” Marshall said.

DUNE is expected to have the potential to reach five-sigma measurements within only a few years upon becoming operational, and DUNE could potentially reach mass-ordering measurements within one year.

“Once we get to this discovery level data, we can start connecting neutrino oscillation to really big-picture, open questions in physics,” Marshall said.

This research addresses key physics mysteries: the origin of neutrino mixing, the existence of additional neutrino types and the completeness of the Standard Model. Beyond fundamental physics discovery, the drive to realize neutrino experiments at unprecedented scales could yield unexpected technological breakthroughs and innovation for the benefit of society.

An SRF accelerator is made up of a series of thermos-like vessels called cryomodules that insulate metal accelerating structures, called cavities. These cavities enable the technology’s super-efficient particle acceleration, but only if their interiors are pristine and their components are installed with exacting accuracy. Misalignment or contamination can degrade performance. In fact, the interiors of these cavities must be spotless, as the tiniest particulates can degrade accelerating efficiency or, worse, render a cavity unusable.

The technicians at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are experts at this rigorous work. They assemble SRF cavities in a “clean room,” taking precautions by wearing protective gear that covers their head, clothing and shoes, along with a mask to filter their breath. But even with these measures, there is significant risk of contaminating the equipment and components.

So, the team behind the Proton Improvement Plan-II project at Fermilab decided to incorporate robots to assist humans assembling accelerator parts inside clean rooms. PIP-II is enhancing the Fermilab Accelerator Complex by building a 215-meter-long linear particle accelerator. The linac will produce high-power proton beams to support new physics experiments at Fermilab and will be used to generate the world’s most powerful neutrino beam for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, currently under construction in Lead, South Dakota, and at Fermilab.

To enhance precision and maintain an ultra-clean environment during assembly of SRF cavities, the PIP-II team brought in a collaborative robot, known as a “cobot,” in 2023. Unlike a standard industrial robot, a cobot is designed to work safely alongside people and react to contact in its environment. Where an industrial robot is programmed to carry out its task to completion no matter what and is kept in a cage for safety, a cobot is equipped with sensors that allow it to stop or respond if it feels unexpected pressure from bumping into something or someone.

This summer, after three years of development, the PIP-II team reached a major milestone: a cobot autonomously aligned a coupler on an SRF cavity in a clean room. A prime example of Fermilab’s commitment to driving technological innovation, this key step forward in SRF cleanroom assembly allows the cobot to next be deployed on a production cavity for PIP-II.

“This breakthrough for the SRF community was only possible because of the team’s multidisciplinary composition and effective collaboration,” said Cristian Boffo, PIP-II project director.

Precision in a clean room

The PIP-II linac will be made of 23 accelerating units — called cryomodules, because they supply the required liquid helium bath and insulate the cavities from the too-warm outside world, much like a Thermos. PIP-II uses five different types of cryomodule, two of which are called single-spoke resonators: SSR1 and SSR2.

SSR cavities look like very squat soda cans as big as a car tire, and they have a flange on the side for connecting a component called the coupler. Typically, cavities are assembled with two people working inside the clean room, ideally standing at least six feet away from the cavity to limit contamination. In 2016 and 2017, PIP-II technicians tried manually aligning and installing the coupler using prototypes. However, the pieces were heavy and awkward to lift, the angle of connection was unwieldy, and the tooling was too complex.

That’s where the idea arose to utilize a cobot. The PIP-II team needed cobotic help to align and install the coupler with the 16 bolt holes on the flange while minimizing the possibility of human contamination. This task requires submillimeter and subdegree precision — all before the coupler touches the sealing surface. As soon as the cavity is closed, the risk of contamination is gone, and human technicians can re-enter the process.

“We want to bring the technicians as far away from the cavity as possible while the cavity is open — not to replace human technicians,” said Mattia Parise, Fermilab senior engineer and the level-3 manager for the SSR cryomodules for PIP-II.

In December 2023, the PIP-II team acquired a cobotic arm with three joints — shoulder, elbow and wrist — that could be controlled by a human outside a clean room. Soon, they had successfully performed their first cobotic installation of a coupler on an SSR2 cavity. PIP-II then procured two additional cobots to boost research and development; over the following three years, they worked with several students from the University of Pisa in Italy and Northern Illinois University in the United States to develop alignment and assembly techniques.

The other piece of the puzzle was to automate the installation. “The goal was always to have this specific part of the process fully automated,” said Parise. “If it’s still semi-automatic and requires the operator to push buttons, you can still make mistakes because you rely on your senses and you’re trying to do alignment with submillimeter precision.”

To automate the coupling process, the PIP-II team added a camera to the cobotic arm. Once calibrated, the camera allowed the cobot to detect the flange’s central hole, align the coupler with the boreholes and connect them together.

In July 2026, they successfully performed the entire process automatically, achieving their three-year-old goal and paving the way for more automated assembly for PIP-II soon.

“Achieving autonomous coupler alignment was a critical first step,” said Tommaso Aiazzi, staff engineer and level-4 and subproject manager for the couplers for PIP-II.

Cobots in the future

All around the world, laboratories are developing robotic or cobotic applications to assemble accelerators or automate clean room processes. “What we are doing differently from everybody else is that we are not relying on plug-and-play solutions,” said Parise.

The problem with off-the-shelf products is that the software usually isn’t scalable or has other limitations because it was developed with a specific application in mind. “Here, we are developing everything from scratch,” said Parise. “We own our process, so we can easily change it because we developed this processing code with our needs in mind.”

This means they have complete adaptability for specialized accelerator applications that can also be tailored to any other existing process that would benefit from automation in a clean room — like the nanofabrication of microchips.

The cobot is already speeding up other aspects of assembly, cutting some two- to three-hour cleaning and parts swapping steps down to about an hour. The team is now working to automate a swapping mechanism that currently takes 30 minutes down to as little as 5 seconds.

“There are many ways to improve things with cobotic automation,” said Colin Narug, a staff engineer at Fermilab who has led R&D on the cobotic activities since 2023. “This can cut away some of the more stressful points to make the clean room technicians’ lives easier — and produce better cavity results.”

In 2025, the team connected multiple SSR2 cavities together in a “string” — mostly using cobots. “It was not fully automatic, but we still benefited from this technology and this process,” said Parise.

The team is excited to implement automated cobotic alignment for an SSR1 string assembly this fall. “Whatever application would benefit from automation, we are ready,” said Parise. “Let’s go.”

We knew it had to fit within the shape of a superconducting radio-frequency cavity, a technology that has been at the heart of Fermilab for decades. The name needed to reflect what we believed from the beginning: that better quantum systems require a fundamental understanding of how superconducting materials influence qubit performance, and that an important challenge would be putting everything together at scale. And, of course, it needed a “Q!”

At that moment, SQMS was little more than a name, a logo and an idea on a board.

I still find it extraordinary to think about what that sketch has become. Six years ago, that idea became a center, and the center became a community of hundreds of people across the United States and around the world. Together, they have built new experimental capabilities, connected scientific disciplines and trained a new generation of scientists and engineers.

That transformation did not happen because we set out simply to build a larger quantum research program. From the beginning, SQMS was built around a scientific question: What really limits the performance of quantum systems, and how far could we push them if we understood those limits from first principles — the foundational laws of physics?

The origins of that question went back to something Fermilab knew extremely well. Decades of work on superconducting radio-frequency cavities for particle accelerators — structures capable of storing electromagnetic energy with extraordinarily low losses — have produced exceptional expertise in superconducting materials, surfaces, fabrication and processing. Looking at those technologies through the lens of quantum information science revealed that they could preserve quantum information for dramatically longer than many conventional quantum devices.

That observation opened a door. What if the remarkable coherence — the ability to preserve a fragile quantum state — of these three-dimensional superconducting cavities could become the basis for a new kind of quantum architecture? What if the materials science techniques developed to understand accelerator cavities could be applied to the microscopic defects limiting qubits? And what if, instead of treating materials, devices, cryogenics, controls, algorithms and applications as separate problems, we assembled the people who understood each piece and asked them to solve the entire problem together?

That became the foundation of SQMS. When the Department of Energy selected SQMS as one of its five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers in August 2020, we suddenly had the opportunity — and the responsibility — to turn that idea into something real.

What followed has been one of the most rewarding scientific experiences of my life.

We built SQMS deliberately as a multi-institutional center that unites expertise from laboratories, universities, companies and multiple disciplines. National laboratories brought unique facilities and engineering capabilities; universities contributed deep scientific knowledge and generations of students; and industry brought fabrication, systems know-how, and the perspective needed to translate discoveries into scalable platforms.

And something important happened in those interactions: people did not simply contribute the expertise they already had. They developed new expertise together. We can see that the original idea worked: when we organize around a sufficiently ambitious scientific challenge, the boundaries between disciplines and institutions become less important than the capabilities each person brings to solving it.

From atoms and interfaces to quantum coherence

One of our starting questions was deceptively simple: Why does a quantum device lose its information?

Quantum information is extraordinarily fragile. Tiny disturbances in a material, microscopic defects at an interface, radiation, magnetic fields or imperfections introduced during fabrication can all create pathways through which quantum information disappears. We call this decoherence, and overcoming it remains one of the central challenges to building useful quantum technologies.

Fermilab brought an unusual perspective to this problem. Years of work on superconducting radio-frequency cavities for particle accelerators had produced cavities capable of storing electromagnetic energy with extraordinarily low losses. Before SQMS formally began, researchers demonstrated microwave photon lifetimes approaching two seconds in these cavity structures — an extraordinary level of coherence that helped inspire the center’s scientific premise.

This work laid the foundations for SQMS to also understand why some superconducting materials and devices perform the way they do, why apparently identical ones sometimes perform differently, and whether that understanding could ultimately allow us to engineer coherence rather than discover it by chance.

That question brought together people who previously spoke very different scientific languages: quantum-device physicists, materials scientists, chemists, accelerator scientists, microscopists, theorists and engineers. Together, they have progressively peeled back the layers of superconducting quantum devices.

For example, SQMS researchers connected microwave losses in niobium to the microscopic structure and chemistry of its surface oxides, identifying specific defects and mechanisms that can absorb energy from a quantum system. The center investigated why different superconducting qubit materials behave differently, including detailed studies of the structure and formation mechanisms of tantalum and niobium oxides and interfaces, and work explaining why the native oxide of tantalum can suppress magnetic defects and loss mechanisms that are more prevalent in niobium oxide.

Researchers discovered the formation of new defects, such as niobium hydrides, in qubits, which affect performance. And increasingly, SQMS has been able to connect microscopic materials properties directly to the performance spread of actual quantum devices — including understanding why devices fabricated in nominally the same way can nevertheless perform differently.

Importantly, this understanding has increasingly translated into methods for actively engineering better, more robust quantum devices. SQMS researchers showed that preventing the formation of lossy niobium surface oxides through surface encapsulation could systematically improve transmon qubit coherence, demonstrating that insights gained from materials science could be translated directly into improved quantum hardware. Transmon qubits are a specific type of superconducting qubit, engineered to be far less sensitive to the small fluctuations in electric charge that can disturb a qubit’s state, making it one of the most widely used qubit designs in superconducting quantum computing today. Today, SQMS routinely fabricates transmon qubit devices with coherence times in the hundreds of microseconds, with some exceeding a millisecond, well beyond the then state-of-the-art 50-100 microsecond values that our partners were observing prior to the center’s inception.

At the same time, researchers have looked beyond the material itself to understand how the surrounding environment affects coherence. Researchers have investigated additional mechanisms that can limit superconducting quantum devices, including magnetic flux trapped inside superconductors as they cool. 

Experiments comparing the same superconducting qubit above ground at Fermilab and deep underground at INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory helped researchers separate the effects of environmental radiation, such as cosmic rays, from sources of noise within the device itself. The results showed that this intrinsic noise still has the greatest effect on overall qubit performance, but radiation can cause brief, identifiable errors that become more important as qubits improve.

SQMS researchers also found that magnetic fields, typically considered harmful to superconducting qubits, can make quantum devices more stable under carefully controlled conditions. This benefit was particularly evident in niobium devices that were surface encapsulated with tantalum metal. In these devices, applying a carefully controlled magnetic flux led to more stable qubit lifetimes without sacrificing long coherence times.

Perhaps the most tangible measure of this progress is not a single record device, but how much the entire collaboration has moved forward together. Early in SQMS, we created the first national Nanofabrication Taskforce, and launched the Round Robin experiment, the first international exchange in which identical qubit chips were measured across different laboratories to systematically expose differences in fabrication, packaging, test setups, controls and measurement protocols. The philosophy was simple: share everything, compare everything and improve together. That approach has helped turn isolated know-how into shared capability, contributing to substantial gains in coherence and reproducibility across the collaboration. SQMS-developed techniques such as surface encapsulation have also been adopted and are now used in laboratories around the world to improve qubit coherence.

Together, these results show how the SQMS materials program has evolved from identifying sources of decoherence to learning how to control the material, the device and its environment to deliberately improve quantum performance. This progression matters enormously. A future quantum computer cannot depend on finding a few exceptional devices among thousands. Scaling requires reproducibility. We need to understand why one device lives longer than another, which fabrication steps introduce variability, and eventually how to manufacture quantum hardware whose performance can be predicted and controlled. 

To me, this represents an important evolution of the field: moving from observing quantum coherence, to understanding it, and ultimately toward engineering it.

From extraordinary coherence to new quantum systems

But understanding coherence was never the final objective. The next question was: What becomes possible if we can preserve quantum information for much longer? Here, one of the technologies that helped inspire SQMS has evolved into something entirely new.

Instead of storing quantum information only in conventional two-level qubits, SQMS has been developing architectures that use the many quantum states available inside ultra-coherent three-dimensional superconducting cavities. These higher-dimensional quantum systems — qudits — can encode and manipulate quantum information in ways that go far beyond qubits.

We have learned how to couple cavities to superconducting control devices, manipulate increasingly complex quantum states and connect these elements into larger systems. Recent demonstrations have brought multiple ultra-coherent cavity modes together with superconducting controls while preserving long coherence, an important step toward programmable cavity-based quantum processors. Other work has developed architectures and techniques for controlling and scaling superconducting quantum systems.

Scaling quantum computing is not simply a matter of making more qubits or qudits. It requires hardware, cryogenics, controls, software and algorithms to operate as one system. SQMS has therefore also worked on the less visible, but essential, technologies of scale, including methods for transferring quantum information between physically separated quantum modules and for efficiently cooling large-scale systems.

This is a transition I find particularly exciting: we are moving from asking, “Can we make an extraordinary quantum device?” to asking,“Can we build an extraordinary quantum system?”

Quantum technologies becoming instruments for discovery

At the same time, technologies developed for quantum science began to find a natural second role in a particle physics laboratory as powerful new instruments for fundamental physics.

A cavity capable of preserving a single microwave photon for an extraordinarily long time is not only a quantum memory. It is also an exquisitely sensitive detector – potentially capable of detecting the incredibly faint signatures of particles left over from the early universe. And quantum processors themselves can become part of physics experiments.

The DarkSRF experiment, for example, repurposed superconducting accelerator cavities as detectors in a search for dark photons — hypothetical particles that could also be a dark matter candidate. The experiment established world-leading laboratory constraints over part of the dark-photon parameter space, offering new clarity on where these dark photons may or may not exist in terms of their mass and interactions with the electromagnetic sector. SQMS researchers are also adapting single-microwave-photon detection techniques to searches for new particles whose signals would otherwise be buried beneath conventional measurement noise.

This broader convergence of quantum technology and fundamental physics has also opened new approaches to precision measurements and tests of nature. Perhaps my favorite illustration is an experiment that asked an almost audacious question: Is quantum mechanics itself exactly correct?

Researchers used truly random quantum measurements generated by a superconducting quantum processor in a superbly sensitive cryogenic radio-frequency experiment searching for tiny nonlinear deviations from quantum mechanics. No deviation was found, but the experiment established substantially stronger constraints on how large such an effect could be. Other SQMS work is exploring how quantum technologies can test fundamental principles and probe new regimes of physics.  

There is something beautiful about that scientific circle: we built quantum technologies by learning how quantum mechanics works and then used those technologies to test quantum mechanics itself. That is the kind of unexpected scientific connection that becomes possible when technology and fundamental science develop together.

Learning how to compute differently

The hardware has also forced us to think differently about computation itself. Much of today’s quantum computing language was developed around the idea of the qubit — a quantum object with two basic states, analogous to the zero and one of classical computing. But SQMS’s cavity-qudit architecture provides access to many quantum levels within a single physical system.

That means we cannot simply take algorithms and error-correction techniques designed for qubits and assume they are the best way to use this hardware.

SQMS researchers have therefore been developing new ways to control higher-dimensional quantum systems, compile quantum operations and suppress errors. Recent work, for example, developed a precise, repeatable way to translate any operation on a qutrit, a three-level quantum system, into the physical steps needed to run it, an important building block for computation using higher-dimensional hardware.

This co-design between hardware and algorithms is essential. Rather than building a machine first and then asking scientists what to do with it later, the hardware architecture, control system, error-correction strategy, algorithms and eventual scientific applications need to inform one another from the beginning.

From better devices to new science

When I put all of this together, what stands out is how interconnected the work has become.

We started by asking why quantum information disappears, a question that took us down to atoms, oxides, interfaces and defects.

The challenge in front of us is no longer how far we can push an individual quantum device. It is how rapidly we can bring these technologies together into scaled, integrated and accessible quantum platforms capable of doing science. That raises a larger question: What infrastructure will scientists need to make that possible?

In many ways, SQMS has spent its first six years building pieces of the answer.

Building more than technology: people, places and a quantum ecosystem

Scientific ideas ultimately need somewhere to become real. Building on DOE investments across SQMS and its partner network, we set out to create the specialized environments needed for cutting-edge quantum research. As the science of SQMS grew, so did the places where that science could happen.

At Fermilab, spaces that had never housed scientific experiments became some of the most advanced quantum laboratories in the country. The Quantum Garage, once quite literally a garage, is today a 6,000-square-foot quantum laboratory containing six extra-large Bluefors dilution refrigerators and SQMS-developed experimental platforms for quantum computing, sensing, metrology and communications. Built collaboratively, it now supports more than 60 experiments running in parallel.

In the beginning

The SQMS Quantum Garage, shown here on August 23, 2021, was literally a garage.

February 6, 2023: A blank canvas – the new Garage space awaits the installation of five new Bluefors dilution refrigerators. Photo credit: Anna Grassellino.

Blank canvas

On Feb. 6, 2023, the new Quantum Garage space awaited installation of five new Bluefors dilution refrigerators. Credit: Anna Grassellino, Fermilab

February 14, 2023: The fridges are coming! The day prior to the delivery of the new fridges, everyone from scientists, to engineers, to techs busy getting the lab ready. Photo credit: Anna Grassellino.

The fridges are coming!

On Feb. 14, 2023, the day before delivery of the new fridges, everyone from scientists to engineers to techs were busy getting the lab ready. Credit: Anna Grassellino, Fermilab

February 15, 2023: Delivery day! The new fridges arrived at the Garage and our whole team could not have been more excited. Photo credit: SQMS Center.

Delivery day

On Feb. 15, 2023, the new fridges arrived at the Quantum Garage, and our whole team could not have been more excited. Credit: SQMS Center

On March 22, 2023, the Quantum Garage was taking shape.

Taking shape

On March 22, 2023, the Quantum Garage was taking shape.

The Quantum Garage at the SQMS Center was officially inaugurated in November 2023. The flagship facility is one of the largest quantum research laboratories in the country. Today, the space is humming with activity with as many as 60 experiments running in parallel.

Flagship facility

The Quantum Garage at the SQMS Center was officially inaugurated in November 2023. The flagship facility is one of the largest quantum research laboratories in the country. Today, the space is humming with activity with as many as 60 experiments running in parallel.

David van Zanten prepares for a cool down cycle in the Quantum Garage. November 2024. Photo credit: Anna Grassellino.

Cool down

In Nov. 2024, David van Zanten prepared for a dilution refrigerator cool-down cycle in the Quantum Garage. Credit: Anna Grassellino, Fermilab

The Quantum Garage is one piece of a broader Fermilab infrastructure supporting quantum systems, superconducting materials and devices, high-magnetic-field experiments and cryogenic technologies needed for future scale.  

SQMS also built a distributed laboratory that connects complementary capabilities across partner institutions, from device fabrication and atomic-scale materials characterization to specialized qubit testbeds and unique experimental environments.

Together, these facilities form a scientific tool chain — from materials to devices to systems to experiments — distributed across institutions and connected by a common mission.

Building bridges between people

When I think about SQMS today, I increasingly think of it as a network of human connections. The collaboration was intentional from the beginning. No single institution, and certainly no single scientific discipline, possesses all the expertise required to solve the problems involved in scaling quantum systems.

Our center is global. In March of 2024, collaborators gathered in London for a US-UK workshop focused on strengthening collaboration in QIS. Photo credit: SQMS Center.

Our center is global

Collaborators gather in London for a U.S.-U.K. workshop in 2024 focused on strengthening collaboration in quantum information science. Credit: SQMS Center.

Our colleagues at Northwestern University hosted a workshop on connecting experimental findings to theoretical understandings of decoherence in superconducting resonators and qubits. February 2024. Photo credit: SQMS Center.

Northwestern University

Our colleagues at Northwestern University hosted a workshop on connecting experimental findings to theoretical understandings of decoherence in superconducting resonators and qubits, in 2024. Credit: SQMS Center.

Principal investigators

Representatives from all five national quantum information science research centers gather in Washington D.C. for a principal investigators meeting in 2024. Credit: Anna Grassellino, Fermilab

August 2024, we welcomed our DOE Program Manager, Zach Goff-Eldredge (center) to Fermilab. Photo credit: SQMS Center.

Welcoming our program manager

Our DOE Program Manager, Zach Goff-Eldredge, center, is welcomed the SQMS Center at Fermilab in 2024. Credit: SQMS Center

Dario Gil’s (center) first visit to Fermilab. (July 2025). Photo credit: SQMS Center.

Darío Gil visits the lab

In 2025, Darío Gil, Department of Energy under secretary for science and Genesis Mission director, makes his first visit to Fermilab.

SQMS therefore embraced a simple model: identify the problem first, then bring together the people with the capabilities needed to solve it, regardless of where they work or what field they come from. To me, this is what a national research center should do at its best. It should not simply distribute work among institutions. It should make the boundaries between them scientifically permeable.

Training a workforce by doing the work

The same philosophy has shaped how I think about workforce development. Some of the most powerful training happens by giving people difficult, important problems and the opportunities to solve them alongside experts from other fields.

Our students and postdocs are not watching quantum science from the sidelines. They are building devices, operating qubits in dilution refrigerators, characterizing materials, developing algorithms, collecting data, commissioning experiments and writing the papers that advance the field. In doing that work, they learn how materials, devices, engineering, computing and scientific applications fit together.

We have also worked to extend that experience beyond the center. In 2023, SQMS hosted the inaugural U.S. Quantum Information Science Summer School, which brought together 150 undergraduate and graduate students and professionals from national laboratories and industry, supported by more than 40 instructors. Participants combined classroom learning with hands-on experience in superconducting qubit and radio-frequency measurements, materials characterization and quantum algorithms.

That is the kind of workforce development I believe we need: not only teaching quantum science but teaching people how to do quantum science together.

Growing an ecosystem

Over time, the community around SQMS has grown well beyond the center’s formal boundaries. When we inaugurated the Quantum Garage in 2023, the first day of the SQMS annual meeting became an “Ecosystem Day,” bringing more than 300 people to Fermilab. By 2025, during the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, that idea had grown into “Exploring the Quantum Universe,” which brought together researchers, students, industry, national laboratories, government and the public to discuss both the science and what the field would need next.

Challenges and opportunities

We value opportunities to bring the right people around a table together to discuss key challenges and opportunities. Oftentimes, one table isn’t big enough! SQMS Annual Meeting, 2023. Credit: Anna Grassellino, Fermilab

Poster session – Student programs and opportunities for young researchers to present their work are a cornerstone of SQMS events. November 2023. Photo credit: Hannah Adams Brumbaugh

Poster session

Student programs and opportunities for young researchers to present their work, including this poster session in 2023, are a cornerstone of SQMS events. Credit: Hannah Adams Brumbaugh

No visit to Fermilab is complete without a tour of the Quantum Garage. Hundreds of guests visit the Quantum Garage at the SQMS Center each year and some are lucky enough to see an open fridge. Here, attendees of Exploring the Quantum Universe capture memories of their visit.

Picturing a fridge

Attendees of “Exploring the Quantum Universe” capture memories of their visit during a tour of the Quantum Garage. Hundreds of guests visit the Quantum Garage at the SQMS Center each year, and some are lucky enough to see an open dilution refrigerator.

Quantum 101- during Exploring the Quantum Universe, attendees could participate in entry level lectures and demonstrations of quantum programs. Andrew Bestwick (Rigetti Computing), teaches a session on qubit measurements and quantum processors.

Quantum 101

Andrew Bestwick of Rigetti Computing teaches about qubit measurements and quantum processors during “Exploring the Quantum Universe.” At the event attendees participated in entry-level lectures and demonstrations of quantum programs.

How it’s made – Machining Specialist, Eddie Pieszchala (left) shares an overview of highly customized components he makes – many of which are used in the SQMS Center.

How it's made

Machining specialist Eddie Pieszchala, left, shares an overview of highly customized components he makes at Fermilab, many of which are used in the SQMS Center.

During Exploring the Quantum Universe in December 2025, we hosted a series of topical roundtables that gathered experts to discuss advancements and the future of our field. Photo credit Ryan Postel, Fermilab.

Roundtable discussions

During "Exploring the Quantum Universe" in 2025, we hosted a series of topical roundtables that gathered experts to discuss advancements and the future of our field. Credit Ryan Postel, Fermilab

The five directors of the National Quantum Information Science Research Centers participated in a panel discussion moderated by Bindu Nair during "Exploring the Quantum Universe," in 2025. From left to right are Bindu Nair, Anna Grassellino, Martin Holt, Travis Humble, Bert de Jong and Chuck Black. Credit JJ Starr, Fermilab

Five directors

The five directors of the National Quantum Information Science Research Centers participated in a panel discussion moderated by Bindu Nair during "Exploring the Quantum Universe," in 2025. From left to right are Bindu Nair, Anna Grassellino, Martin Holt, Travis Humble, Bert de Jong and Chuck Black. Credit JJ Starr, Fermilab

Leadership from the five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers comes together at the centers’ joint booth during the 2026 IEEE Quantum Week. The collaborative presence included the booth organized by communications leaders across the five centers and a panel featuring all five center directors. Photo credit: Anna Grassellino

Quantum Week

Leaders from the five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers gather at the centers’ joint booth during the 2026 IEEE Quantum Week. The collaborative presence included the booth organized by communications leaders across the five centers and a panel featuring all five center directors. Credit: Anna Grassellino, Fermilab

The future of quantum – students celebrate the second Saturday Morning Quantum graduation on April 25 at the Olive Harvey College Learning Center. Led by Fermilab’s Office of Education and Public Engagement in collaboration with scientists and engineers from SQMS, the 10-week program introduces Chicago-area high school students to quantum science, technology and career pathways through classroom and hands-on learning. Credit: Keith French, Fermilab

Future of quantum

Students celebrate graduation from the second Saturday Morning Quantum educational series on at the Olive Harvey College Learning Center, in Chicago. Led by Fermilab’s Office of Education and Public Engagement, in collaboration with scientists and engineers from SQMS, the 10-week program introduced Chicago-area high school students to quantum science, technology and career pathways through classroom and hands-on learning. Credit: Keith French, Fermilab

That community will be increasingly important as quantum technology moves toward larger, more integrated systems. The next stage will require not only advances in individual technologies, but facilities sophisticated enough to bring them together and make them accessible to scientists who want to use quantum systems to pursue their own scientific questions.

Looking around SQMS today, at the laboratories we have built, the people we have trained, and the relationships connecting universities, national laboratories and industry, I realize that we have spent six years building many of the ingredients of exactly that future.

We built devices. We built laboratories. We built capabilities that did not exist before. But above all, we built connections — and those connections may ultimately be the most important infrastructure we leave behind.