Officials at the University of Pittsburgh announced plans to launch a new innovation center that will look to serve as a central hub for quantum computer-based research and development.
The Western Pennsylvania Quantum Information Core — to which Pitt's Strategic Advancement Fund has allocated an $11.6 million loan to help start — is to serve as a cross-disciplinary and multi-institution effort for the university and its partners to help them take a lead in the rapidly expanding technology.
It's an effort that builds on Pitt's Pittsburgh Quantum Institute, which launched a decade ago in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and Duquesne University.
"The [Western Pennsylvania Quantum Information Core] will allow the entire region to ‘level up’ to a more comprehensive and integrated platform for quantum experimentation across a range of fundamental physics and emerging applications," Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research at Pitt, said in a prepared statement.
Rob Cunningham, vice chancellor for research infrastructure at Pitt, described the Western Pennsylvania Quantum Information Core is "a natural progression" and "the natural next step" for the university.
Michael Hatridge, a physics professor in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and a quantum-computer builder, will serve as the Core's inaugural director. In January 2022, Hatridge led a team of Pitt researchers who successfully developed and patented a new modular-based system for connecting together qubits — a unit of measurement and a building block behind quantum computing.
In modern computing, computers use bits of information to solve problems, amid myriad other applications that computers can do. The bits that make up modern computers consist of ones and zeros, a signal that translates to being either on or off.
The qubits used in quantum computing exist in an on or off state too, but qubits also possess the ability to exist in a state between the two, which allows for these machines to solve advanced mathematical problems in a more realistic timeframe, rather then the centuries it would take a traditional modern computer.
Researchers, faculty members and students who use the Western Pennsylvania Quantum Information Core can expect to be greeted with made-to-spec equipment like correlated photon counters, vacuum-inducing testing machines and refrigerators that sustain temperatures at around absolute zero, which itself is equivalent to about -460 F.
Pitt hasn't disclosed timelines as to when the build-out work on the Core will begin or when it will wrap up. But its existence comes as part of the university's "Plan for Pitt" strategic initiative, which launched in the fall of 2021.
