The WMI opens its doors for the public audience from 10:00 to 17:00. All are invited to learn more about our cutting-edge research in quantum physics. For the detailed program of the institute, please see https://www.wmi.badw.de/detail-pages/tdot2026.
For general information, please visit https://forschungscampus-garching.de/.
Speaker: Dr. Daniele De Bernardis, CNR-INO / LENS
Title: Electrostatics-induced breakdown of the integer quantum Hall effect in cavity QED
Time: Wednesday, July 29th, 2026, 14:15 h
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Carlos Gonzalez-Ballestero, TU Wien
Title: Passive state transfer between qubits coupled to a waveguide
Time: Monday, July 27th, 2026, 15:00 h
Silicon-vacancy spins in diamond are promising candidates for building phononic quantum devices, where quantized vibrational modes—rather than photons—are used as quantum information carriers. In current devices, however, coherence times are still too short to realistically implement such a scheme. Based on a protocol recently developed at WMI, a team of researchers from Harvard University has demonstrated that the coherence times of silicon-vacancy spins can be enhanced by continuously driving them with a strong acoustic wave. In their study published in Nature Physics, the authors demonstrated that this experimental technique not only prolongs the lifetime of the quantum superposition, but also achieves record-high spin rotation frequencies—a crucial control tool for manipulating spins on incredibly short timescales.
Distributing entanglement across remote qubits remains a key barrier to scaling quantum computers and networks. In a collaboration between the Quantum Theory Team at WMI and their colleagues at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), researchers have bypassed the complex, active controls typically required for this process. In a new study published in Physical Review X, the teams at ISTA and WMI have demonstrated a simplified scheme that immerses two isolated superconducting qubits in a shared "quantum bath" of correlated microwave photons. This passive environment autonomously drives the qubits into a stable, entangled state without external intervention. By leveraging the environment as a resource rather than a source of noise, this milestone proof-of-concept demonstration offers a highly scalable, hands-free blueprint for building future large-scale quantum processors.
Link to Physics Viewpoint.
Entanglement—the defining quantum correlation between distant particles—is a key resource for quantum networks, but generating it typically requires carefully engineered coherent control and low-noise conditions. Thermal noise, the random fluctuations present in any warm environment, is usually considered the enemy; it destroys quantum coherence and prevents the formation of entangled states. In a new paper recently published in the journal Quantum, researchers at WMI proposed a protocol that turns this intuition on its head. They predicted that two distant qubits, connected by a quantum channel and driven by a filtered but purely thermal noise source, gradually relax into a highly entangled state. This process happens even without any coherent driving or active control and could, therefore, open up a new and resource-efficient route for scalable quantum information processing applications.
