Eighteen quantum facilities — full text
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Google Quantum AI
Quantum computing · Santa Barbara, CA, USA · 34.4208, -119.6982
Google’s quantum computing lab. Announced the Willow chip in December 2024: 105 superconducting qubits with error correction below the threshold — meaning more qubits means lower error, the milestone the field has been chasing for two decades.
Key result: Willow performed a benchmark calculation in under 5 minutes that would take a classical supercomputer ~10 septillion years (a 10^25 year speedup, by their estimate).
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IBM Quantum
Quantum computing · Yorktown Heights, NY, USA · 41.2697, -73.7707
IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Operates the largest superconducting qubit systems in the world. Condor (1,121 qubits, late 2023) was the first quantum chip to break the 1,000-qubit barrier. Heron (156 qubits, 2024) emphasizes lower error over higher qubit count.
Key result: IBM Quantum Network gives 250+ partner organizations cloud access to real quantum hardware. And the newest thing out of Yorktown is not a chip — it is a refrigerator. On 19 August 2026 IBM announced it had “successfully joined and cooled down two cryogenic modules into a single environment,” reaching 4 kelvin in under five days and then below 15 millikelvin. The two modules together stand “more than 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide,” and the design is meant to scale into the shared, ultra-cold system needed “to link hundreds of quantum chips.” This is the same argument the NIST–UMD pin makes about fiber, pointed at computing: the physics is not the hard part any more — the plumbing that has to exist around it is. A qubit that works is a result; a room-sized machine that keeps hundreds of them at 15 mK is deployability.
Tier and provenance, because this one needs it. This is a company announcement, read from IBM’s own newsroom release — not a peer-reviewed result, and not independently verified here. The dates past 2026 are a roadmap, not a record: IBM states a 2027 target of “at least 1,000 programmable qubits” linked across processors, and a 2029 machine, Starling, which it expects to be the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. Expects is the word IBM used and the word this page keeps. Commentary elsewhere calls the refrigerator quantum computing’s real bottleneck; IBM’s release does not say that, so neither does this pin.
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Atom Computing
Quantum computing · Berkeley, CA, USA · 37.8716, -122.2727
Neutral-atom quantum computing — uses individual atoms trapped in laser tweezers as qubits. In October 2023 announced a 1,180-qubit system, the largest qubit-count ever publicly announced by a wide margin at the time.
Key result: Neutral atoms offer long coherence times and natural scalability without the cryogenics superconducting systems require.
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PsiQuantum
Quantum computing · Palo Alto, CA, USA · 37.4419, -122.1430
Photonic quantum computing — the bet is that fabricating quantum processors on silicon-photonic chips at semiconductor-foundry scale is the path to a fault-tolerant million-qubit machine. Closed a $617M Series E in 2024.
Key result: Building manufacturing partnership with GlobalFoundries. Plans for a fault-tolerant quantum computer in Brisbane, Australia.
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IonQ
Quantum computing · College Park, MD, USA · 38.9897, -76.9378
Trapped-ion quantum computing — uses individual ytterbium ions held in electromagnetic traps as qubits. First pure-play quantum computing company to go public (October 2021, NYSE: IONQ).
Key result: Cloud access via AWS Braket, Azure Quantum, and Google Cloud. Recent systems use barium ions for higher fidelity.
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D-Wave Systems
Quantum computing · Burnaby, BC, Canada · 49.2488, -122.9805
The quantum annealing pioneer. D-Wave systems are not general-purpose quantum computers — they’re specialized optimizers, useful for problems that map to finding the lowest-energy state of a complex system. Latest Advantage2 has 4,400+ qubits with much improved connectivity.
Key result: In March 2025 (published in Science) claimed the first demonstration of quantum advantage on a real-world materials-science problem — magnetic-materials simulation vs. a classical supercomputer (ORNL Frontier). Contested. Classical tensor-network groups have since argued the same problem is reachable classically, and D-Wave has rebutted. This page reports the claim as a claim and does not adjudicate it — treat it as live, not settled.
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Rigetti Computing
Quantum computing · Berkeley, CA, USA · 37.8688, -122.2725
Superconducting quantum systems with a focus on modular, multi-chip architectures. Builds full-stack: chips, software, cloud (Forest, Quil). Publicly traded (Nasdaq: RGTI).
Key result: Pioneered the multi-chip approach — tiling smaller, high-quality quantum chips into larger systems without monolithic fabrication.
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USTC Jiuzhang
Quantum computing · Hefei, Anhui, China · 31.8404, 117.2790
University of Science and Technology of China — Pan Jianwei’s group. The Jiuzhang series is photonic quantum computing using boson sampling. Jiuzhang 3.0 (2023) handled 255 photons.
Key result: Claimed quantum advantage on Gaussian boson sampling problems — calculations the world’s fastest classical supercomputers cannot reproduce in any reasonable time.
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Oak Ridge National Lab
Quantum communication · Oak Ridge, TN, USA · 35.9270, -84.3133
The DOE’s Quantum Science Center is anchored at ORNL. Operates a 300-kilometer dark fiber testbed — the longest in the national lab system — with dedicated quantum networking channels for entangled photons over deployed fiber, supporting prototype work for the future U.S. quantum internet backbone.
Key result: In 2024 ORNL was awarded one of two DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Research Quantum Internet Testbeds. Twenty-plus years of quantum R&D and 30+ full-time quantum staff anchored around the Quantum Science Center.
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MIT Center for Quantum Engineering
Quantum communication · Cambridge, MA, USA · 42.3601, -71.0942
MIT-Lincoln Laboratory quantum networking, MIT’s Engineering Quantum Systems group, and the Center for Quantum Engineering. Particularly active in quantum repeaters — the hardware that would let a quantum link be extended without a trusted node. This page used to call ~100 km “the fiber limit.” That is the practical range of commercial decoy-BB84 kit, not a limit on fiber: twin-field QKD has run 1,002 km with no repeaters and no trusted nodes, and the Oak Ridge pin on this map is a 300 km deployed testbed.
Key result: Lincoln Lab’s superconducting qubit fabrication is the reference for the field. MIT’s diamond-NV-center work is leading the quantum-repeater path.
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TU Delft / QuTech
Quantum communication · Delft, Netherlands · 52.0022, 4.3736
QuTech is the joint TU Delft + TNO quantum institute. Built the world’s first multi-node entanglement-based quantum network — three physically separated nodes maintained shared quantum state over fiber. The first piece of a real quantum internet.
Key result: 2021–2024: demonstrated 3-node entangled quantum network, then on-demand entanglement distribution. The Dutch government funds the Quantum Internet & Networked Computing programme around this work.
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NIST Gaithersburg
Quantum communication · Gaithersburg, MD, USA · 39.1400, -77.2185
The National Institute of Standards and Technology campus is one end of a 62 km entanglement link to the University of Maryland — run over ordinary deployed commercial fiber that is about 70% aerial. Strung on utility poles. Wind, traffic, sun, weather. Aerial fiber is, in the paper’s words, “typically considered unsuitable” for polarization-encoded quantum states, and you can see why — though that phrase is the authors’ own flourish in their Conclusion, carries no citation, and the paper’s own reference list contains counterexamples. Aerial QKD is not new ground: a plug-and-play system was stability-tested over aerial cable in 2002 (Stucki et al.), and there was a long-distance aerial field implementation by 2018. What is new here is entanglement, over 62 km, held for 24 hours. And you can see why the phrase gets used: on this link the polarization state drifts by tens of degrees within seconds during the day. At night it drifts slowly and, in the paper’s words, “can remain stable for over tens of minutes.” A pair of automated polarization compensation modules — Qunnect-developed, per the NIST release; four Qunnect staff are co-authors — measure the drift against six reference polarization states and correct it continuously. The correction sessions cost 7.2% of link time; entanglement flows in the 3-second windows between them.
Key result: Over a continuous 24 h run the link held a time-averaged CHSH parameter of S = 2.34 ± 0.37, violating the classical bound for more than 20 h. Rates depend on the configuration: ~1500 pairs/sec were detected with the polarization analyzers removed; the CHSH runs themselves peaked near 200 pairs/sec, the two analyzers costing ~8 dB — 3 dB of that is projection loss inherent to the measurement, ~5 dB is insertion loss from the hardware. The control run is the number that matters: with stabilization switched off, S fell below the classical bound of 2 after about 3 h, and no violation was seen for the ~13 h remainder of that 16 h measurement.
Sources: Shi et al., J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 18, 813 (2026) · NIST news release, 5 Aug 2026 (updated 6 Aug)
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University of Maryland / JQI
Quantum communication · College Park, MD, USA · 38.9881, -76.9425
The receiving end. Idler photons generated at NIST arrive here after 62 km of deployed fiber; their partner signal photons never leave NIST, and a parallel fiber from the same TX/RX pair carries the timing so coincidences can be counted at one place. Only one photon of each pair actually crosses the 62 km — the link is one-directional and takes two strands, not one. Two details worth sitting with. First, the 62 km is fiber route length — these two campuses are only about 29 km apart in a straight line — that is this page’s own great-circle from the two pin coordinates, not a figure from the paper. Deployed fiber follows poles and right-of-way, not the crow, and it routinely runs twice the map distance. Second, the link measured about 18 dB end to end, but only ~12.4 dB of that is fiber attenuation. The other ~5.6 dB is field splices, patch panels and optical switches — the loss budget a spec sheet never shows you. Averaged over 62 km that is roughly 0.29 dB/km all-in — against the ~0.2 dB/km of fiber attenuation the paper itself assumes. This page used to compare that against “~0.18 dB/km on QuantumPulse’s own spec line.” That figure was withdrawn: 0.18 is a vendor/spool typical, the simulator now uses 0.2 dB/km plus a 5.6 dB field-hardware term, and ITU-T G.652.D specifies 0.3 dB/km as a maximum at 1550 nm. The averaging is this page’s; the 12.4 / 5.6 split is the paper’s.
Key result: This is not a distance record and was never offered as one. The same paper’s own bibliography carries longer fiber links: 155 km of metropolitan fiber (Du et al., Newton 1, 100303, 2025), 192 km of deployed fibre (Wengerowsky et al., npj Quantum Inf. 6, 5, 2020) and a transnational 248 km link (Neumann et al., Nat. Commun. 13, 6134, 2022) — and satellite has done 1,200 km. In 2026 a USTC group entangled two quantum memories through 420 km of fiber (Luo et al., arXiv:2504.05660; published Phys. Rev. Lett. 2026, doi:10.1103/ccd6-rf1s — the preprint is what is held here), though the paper puts both nodes “all located at a laboratory in USTC” with only ~10 km of fiber leaving the building — spool-kilometers, not street-kilometers. And distance is not that paper’s headline — the bound is. Luo et al.: “when channel transmittance is lower than 10−4.5 (which refers to a distance over 230 km in our experiment), the entangling probability in our experiment is higher than the PLOB bound” — the repeaterless limit on direct transmission. A heralded memory scheme scales with √η instead of η, so this is not a violation of the bound; it is the demonstration that memories earn their keep. That is the real answer to “why memories,” and it is better than the kilometres. The cost, from their Table I: 1.09 × 10−6 entangling probability per trial at 420 km, with concurrence signal-to-noise of 3.5 and 2.6 on the two Bell states (Ψ+ and Ψ−).
→ Back to this pin, because the sentence above belongs to a different experiment. What is new in the NIST–UMD result is that it works on aerial fiber at all: the fiber you do not have to trench for, drill for, or lay under a seabed. Reach was already solved. Deployability was not.
→ One thing a reader should weigh for themselves: the paper’s Disclosures line reads “The authors declare no conflicts of interest”, while four of its twelve authors work for the company whose stabilization modules are the device under test. Both facts are printed in the paper; make of them what you will.
Sources: Shi et al., J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 18, 813 (2026) · NIST news release, 5 Aug 2026
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Micius Satellite Ground Station
Satellite QKD · Beijing, China · 39.9042, 116.4074
In 2016 China launched Micius, the world’s first quantum communication satellite. Demonstrated satellite-to-ground quantum key distribution (QKD) over thousands of kilometers, then a 7,600-km intercontinental quantum-encrypted video call between Beijing and Vienna in 2017. After about a decade in orbit, Micius re-entered the atmosphere on 2026-01-25 — the work it proved lives on; the orbit shown on Quantum Pulse is representative.
Key result: QKD over satellite proves long-range quantum encryption is engineerable, not just theoretical. The eavesdropping-detection property is physical: any interception collapses the quantum state and is measurable at the receiver.
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University of Toronto — Steinberg Group
Research milestones · Toronto, ON, Canada · 43.6629, -79.3957
Aephraim Steinberg’s quantum optics group at U of T. In September 2024 they posted the "negative time" photon measurement — photons passing through a cloud of rubidium atoms appeared to spend negative dwell time in the excited state of those atoms. Headlines made it sound like time travel; the actual finding is narrower and better.
Key result: Negative group delay is decades old and is not the news. This page used to say it was. What Angulo et al. actually measured is the mean atomic excitation time — how long a transmitted photon leaves the atoms excited — probed via the cross-Kerr phase shift on a separate weak off-resonant beam. Verbatim from the paper: they measure “mean atomic excitation times ranging from (−0.82 ± 0.31)τ0 for the most narrowband pulse to (0.54 ± 0.28)τ0 for the most broadband pulse.” The cross-Kerr effect is the probe; the excitation time is the result. A negative excitation time is the new thing.
The objection this pin used to omit: Sabine Hossenfelder argues the “negative time” has nothing to do with the passage of time and is a description of how photons move through a medium and how their phases shift. Steinberg conceded the headline was provocative but noted that no serious scientist had challenged the experimental result. Result solid, wording contested.
Versions, because this page has a rule about it. What is linked is the preprint, arXiv:2409.03680 (5 Sep 2024), titled “Experimental evidence that a photon can spend a negative amount of time in an atom cloud.” The published version is in Phys. Rev. Lett. (2026), doi:10.1103/gjfq-k9dv, and peer review retitled it to “Experimental Observation of Negative Weak Values for the Time Atoms Spend in the Excited State as a Photon Is Transmitted.” The published title is the more careful claim — it is the argument this pin is already making. Volume and article number are not printed: no primary page has been opened here.
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Caltech IQIM
Research milestones · Pasadena, CA, USA · 34.1377, -118.1253
The Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech. Home of John Preskill (who coined “quantum supremacy” in 2012). Theoretical and experimental work on fault-tolerant quantum computation, quantum gravity / AdS-CFT, and quantum information theory.
Key result: IQIM’s theoretical work underwrites a substantial fraction of how the entire field thinks about errors, codes, and the limits of quantum advantage.
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CERN
Research milestones · Geneva, Switzerland · 46.2333, 6.0500
In 2024, CERN’s ATLAS detector demonstrated quantum entanglement at the highest energies ever measured — entangled top quark pairs produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. Not quantum computing, but quantum-information principles applied to high-energy physics in a way that wasn’t possible before.
Key result: First observation of entanglement between two of the heaviest known fundamental particles. Opens a new tool for testing quantum mechanics against general relativity at extreme scales.
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Yale University — Navon Lab
Research milestones · New Haven, CT, USA · 41.3110, -72.9260
Fermi’s Golden Rule is one of the most widely used formulas in quantum mechanics. It links a measurable quantity — the rate at which a system transitions between energy states — to the microscopic interaction driving that transition. It is standard in undergraduate physics coursework and load-bearing across chemistry, materials science, semiconductor design, and quantum computing.
The rule holds only under two conditions, both easy to overlook. First, the perturbation applied to the system must be “weak” relative to the system’s own energy scales — a threshold that depends on quantities not always known in advance. Second, the rule is valid only inside a finite window of time: the window opens once the system has had a chance to respond to the perturbation, and closes before the system has been driven too far from its initial state. Outside that window the formula still returns an answer — it simply stops being the right one.
Key result: Nir Navon’s lab at Yale used atoms cooled to nanokelvin temperatures and radio-frequency control precise enough to watch the rule turn on and off in real time. The team turned that observation into a blueprint — a set of conditions to check before relying on the formula for a given system or data set. Published in Nature Physics, July 2026.
Sources: Yale News — “Check your ingredients” (plain-language, has the quotes) · Chen, Huang, Ji, Schumacher, Tsidilkovski, Schuckert, Assumpção, Navon. “Emergence of Fermi’s golden rule in a quantum many-body system.” Nature Physics, July 2026 · Preprint (open access) — arXiv:2502.14867
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