15 October 2026. IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) and the University of Cambridge have opened the IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre. It is the first-ever university-based IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre. The Centre is located at the Ray Dolby Centre, the new home of the University's Cavendish Laboratory.
The partnership was first announced on March 11, 2026. The Centre's nine inaugural research projects bring together Cambridge researchers and IonQ specialists. Projects include co-development of new quantum network nodes and sensing capabilities, and strengthening of the existing Cambridge-to-Bristol quantum network.
IonQ will deploy a Superion 256-qubit quantum computer and an entanglement-distribution quantum network at the University. The on-campus IonQ quantum network will consist of two Quantum Networking Data Centres and three Quantum Networking Nodes.
"The opening of the IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre turns a landmark agreement into a working home for quantum research inside one of the world's most storied physics laboratories," said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ.
Innovate UK will provide access and computing time for the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) over three years, as part of the collaboration. The partnership supports new academic positions, postdoctoral fellows, and PhD students at Cambridge, and aligns with the UK National Quantum Strategy.
Source: The Quantum Insider
Quantum effects already underpin everyday devices such as transistors, lasers and MRI scanners, yet their full potential remains untapped. Researchers are engineering two-dimensional materials and quantum spin liquids to serve as building blocks for topological quantum computing and more stable qubits, combining theoretical modelling with material fabrication. Other efforts use quantum sensors to probe dark matter and read superconducting qubit data without disturbing it.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Leibniz University Hannover have achieved strong coupling between light and long-lived acoustic vibrations in an optical fiber for the first time, using stimulated Brillouin scattering at 4 K without any optical or mechanical resonator. A measurable gap in the spectral response confirms the effect, which typically appears only in cavity systems.
Silicon spin qubits usually lose accuracy when many qubits are driven in parallel, a barrier to scalable quantum processors. Writing in Nature Physics, RIKEN researchers traced the main error source to AC Stark shifts from shared microwave control signals. Their pairwise phase calibration protocol restored gate fidelities above 99.99% for up to three simultaneous qubits, and about 99.9% across all five, near fault-tolerant requirements.
