Center for Quantum Sensing and Quantum Materials at Grainger College of Engineering Awarded $12.6M by DOE

(Science.blog) A team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering was awarded an Energy Frontier Research Center by the Department of Energy (EFRC). The new center will focus on developing three cutting-edge quantum sensing devices.
Based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Center for Quantum Sensing and Quantum Materials brings together experts from UIUC, DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and the University of Illinois-Chicago.
They’ll work on developing three cutting-edge quantum sensing devices: a scanning qubit microscope, a spectroscopy instrument that takes advantage of pairs of entangled electrons and another instrument that will probe materials with pairs of photons from SLAC’s X-ray free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source, which has recently reopened after an upgrade.
These new techniques will allow researchers to see in much greater detail why quantum materials do the weird things they do, paving the way to discovering new quantum materials and inventing even more sensitive probes of their behavior.
“What is exciting is that this center gives us a chance to create some really new quantum measurement techniques for studying energy-relevant quantum materials,” center Director Peter Abbamonte, a professor of physics at UIUC.