I still remember clearly when, six and a half years ago, a few of us sketched the first SQMS logo on a board in a Fermilab hallway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is America’s laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. Fermi Forward Discovery Group manages Fermilab for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on social media.
The Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center at Fermilab is supported by the DOE Office of Science.
The Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center is one of the five U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Centers. Led by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, SQMS is a collaboration of more than 40 partner institutions — national labs, academia and industry — working together to bring transformational advances in the field of quantum information science. The center leverages Fermilab’s expertise in building complex particle accelerators to engineer multiqubit quantum processor platforms based on state-of-the-art qubits and superconducting technologies. Working hand in hand with embedded industry partners, SQMS will build a quantum computer and new quantum sensors at Fermilab, which will open unprecedented computational opportunities. For more information, please visit www.sqmscenter.fnal.gov.
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