Building the Capital of Quantum

THE GLENN L. MARTIN WIND TUNNEL opened in secret at the dawn of the Cold War. A gift to the University of Maryland from the aircraft industry titan whose name it bears, the facility was used to develop U.S. military planes and missiles for a looming showdown with the Soviet Union. Long since declassified, it still works with government agencies as well as civilian companies, though it might be best known locally for giving guests a hair-whipping thrill at UMD’s annual open house.

Early this year, the 76-year-old facility briefly slipped back into its shadowy security role. University officials gave the startup company Patero, based in a UMD business accelerator, a chance to test its technology by locking down the tunnel’s computer systems—not against midcentury spycraft, but a futuristic form of cyberattack that doesn’t yet exist.

The work lay in the quantum arena, where firms and nations are racing to introduce the first powerful quantum computer, a machine that could potentially sow chaos by quickly defeating currently invulnerable data security measures. But it could also be used to create revolutionary, life-enhancing advances in pharmaceuticals, ultra-secure networking, the fabrication of new material with unheard-of properties, and other areas.

UMD President Darryll J. Pines coined “the Capital of Quantum” as a geographical call to action, playing on the university’s advantageous location adjacent to Washington, D.C., and its reputation as the site of many quantum discoveries over the decades.

“A few years ago, I realized this worldwide competition was developing around quantum,” he says. “We have to maintain the university’s academic lead in this area, and we can’t let the state of Maryland lose out on the economic benefits of this potential industry as it emerges.”

Quantum science itself isn’t new—Einstein and other physicists explored how matter and energy at the scale of atoms and below make up the universe more than a century ago. Later, their discoveries formed the basis for transistor radios, computers, medical imaging machines and more.

In 1994, “quantum” assumed a broader meaning when computer scientist Peter Shor of Bell Labs demonstrated a quantum algorithm that allowed for an exponential speed-up of prime number factoring, which is the basis of data encryption, but only with the right hardware.

“That’s what really stimulated everyone everywhere to start thinking about this: How do we build a quantum computer?” says Steven Rolston, professor and chair of UMD’s Department of Physics.

UMD was already strong in basic physics research, and its physics department soon struck up a more formal link with the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST), in 2006 combining to launch the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) with UMD’s Laboratory for Physical Sciences as a third partner. JQI quickly grew into a major center of quantum theory and experimentation, with more than 200 scientists and scores of Ph.D. students each year turning out hundreds of publications. In 2014, NIST and UMD launched the complementary Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), which shares many faculty and fellows with JQI.

“This really puts us at the top in terms of quantum research,” Pines says. “They very intentionally and strategically brought in people from across the important domain spaces in quantum. That led to the recruiting of a young faculty member who helped push things to the next level for UMD.”

That faculty member was physics Professor Christopher Monroe, hired at UMD in 2007. Early on, he made headlines around the world for using atoms to “teleport” quantum information across space using quantum entanglement, in which particles are “linked” so that what affects one affects both. Entanglement was also part of what allowed Monroe and colleagues to use ions of the element ytterbium as natural “qubits.” These are the quantum equivalent of “bits,” which are represented by zeros and ones in regular, or “classical,” computers. Unlike classical bits, though, qubits counterintuitively can represent a zero and one at once, opening the possibility of vastly accelerating calculations.

Along with collaborator Junsang Kim of Duke University, Monroe founded IonQ in 2015. (Both have returned to academia full-time as professors at Duke.) The fledgling firm received financial backing after venture capitalist Harry Weller, a general partner at New Enterprise Associates, delved into Monroe’s “trapped ion” computing research. Before long, the tiny startup was making waves with its early-stage quantum computers and was being mentioned in the same breath as giants like Microsoft, IBM and Google in the race to build the first broadly useful quantum computer system.

After years of expansion, the firm debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 as the world’s first publicly traded “pure play” quantum hardware and software company; it was valued at more than $1 billion as it prepared to enter the exchange, aka a “unicorn.” Early in 2025, the company’s value reached 10 times that amount.

In the back of the company’s headquarters off Campus Drive, technicians exactingly assemble quantum processors in a clean room, while giant racks of quantum computers in another room serve customers around the world looking to stay current on the state of the field. A next-gen computer slated to come online late this year will nearly double the number of qubits in IonQ’s flagship machine, which the company expects to boost computing power to about 250 million times that of the current computer. That should be game-changing in terms of moving quantum computers from objects of study to useful tools—not replacing conventional computers, but starting to be necessary alongside them, says the company’s chief financial officer, Thomas Kramer.

“It will be a computational power the world has not yet seen,” he says. “At that point, we think use cases (for quantum computing) will start to become more obvious.”

In true startup fashion, IonQ is based in a repurposed warehouse, but intends to relocate to a new headquarters in the Discovery District, a move the university is helping to support.

Other plans call for an expansion at the company’s current location of an IonQ-UMD collaboration—the National Quantum Laboratory at Maryland (QLab). This user facility provides an opportunity for researchers from around the world as well as UMD students and others to access IonQ’s quantum computing technology and interact with its experts. Former UMD quantum scientist Norbert Linke, who helped develop trapped-ion computing, will return to the university this fall to serve both as QLab director and a professor of physics.

The QLab is a node on Mid-Atlantic Region Quantum Internet (MARQI), which was designed by Professor Edo Waks and Tripti Sinha, assistant vice president and chief technology officer with the Division of Information Technology. With funding from NSF, it has more than 2 kilometers of fiber optic cable that extend across UMD, serving as a testbed for quantum networking technologies that will enable the transmission of quantum information using current “classical” Internet infrastructure.

“The Internet has proven the power of aggregation and distribution by networking resources, and we believe we can build on quantum computing the same way,” Sinha says. “It’s still in the future, but the University of Maryland could be poised to be the first place where quantum computers communicate on a network.”

At IonQ HQ, Kramer points to a wall of plaques commemorating IonQ’s hundreds of patents, evidence of a company that is surging.

“As the company grows and matures, more patents have now been generated by IonQ as opposed to coming from our university partners, which shows our commitment to generating new, groundbreaking IP in-house,” he says.

What’s needed now is infrastructure—backed by UMD and the growing regional quantum ecosystem—for companies to build on the promising commercial foundation IonQ has been laying.

Its rise as a publicly traded spinoff quantum company was a towering achievement for UMD—a feat no other university or group trying to create a quantum hub elsewhere has replicated, says Ronald Walsworth, a professor of engineering and physics who directs UMD’s Quantum Technology Center (QTC).

The Capital of Quantum initiative brings a laser-like focus to leverage decades of related achievements, Pines says.

“The governor’s announcement here at UMD puts a competitive stake in the ground that says here’s what we intend to build: an emerging industry with the University of Maryland and all its strengths in quantum at the center,” he says. “This will bring great economic benefits for our state along with immense potential to create solutions to some of the world’s pressing problems.”