About
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), operated by the Fermi Research Alliance for the US Department of Energy, is a particle physics laboratory that has built one of the USA's most active quantum science programmes. Located in Batavia, Illinois, Fermilab hosts the SQMS (Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems) Center, one of five DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, which develops superconducting quantum systems for both computing and sensing. Fermilab's quantum research draws on its deep expertise in superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavities developed for particle accelerators, applying these to quantum computing through SRF-based qubits that achieve among the longest coherence times of any superconducting system. The SQMS Center partners with Rigetti Computing, Google, NASA, and multiple universities to translate these advances into practical quantum computers. Fermilab also develops quantum sensing technologies for fundamental physics, including quantum sensors for dark matter detection, quantum-enhanced gravitational wave detectors, and quantum clocks for precision timing in particle experiments. Fermilab hosts the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST), a University of Illinois partnership, and operates the Quantum Network testbed connecting its campus to Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago via the Chicago Quantum Exchange network. This quantum network forms one of the world's longest metropolitan quantum networking testbeds. In November 2025, the Department of Energy renewed the SQMS Center with $125M over five years, funding a second phase known as SQMS 2.0. In February 2026, SQMS reported a multimode quantum processor with a coherence lifetime beyond 20 milliseconds, among the longest ever measured in a superconducting system. SQMS is also one of nine US national labs adopting NVIDIA's NVQLink architecture to couple quantum processors with GPU supercomputing. Up
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