A team led by Stony Brook University has received a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the next phase of the National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NQVL) Quantum Testbeds. The funding will be distributed over two years and will back a project known as SCY-QNet, which aims to establish a 10-node quantum network linking atomic quantum processing units at Stony Brook, Columbia, Yale, and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The award is part of a three-phase competitive process under the NQVL program. Stony Brook’s advancement to Phase II required successful completion of an initial pilot project and submission of a four-part proposal. Finalists participated in interviews with experts in Quantum Information Science and Technology (QIST) and NSF program managers before selection.
“This award puts Stony Brook and our collaborators solidly in a national leadership position for quantum networking and communication,” said Kevin Gardner, Vice President for Research and Innovation at Stony Brook. “Our goal continues to be that Long Island and New York will be the birthplace of the new, secure quantum internet and the team of scientists and engineers that are responsible for the success of Phase 1 are second to none and deserve our recognition, praise, and continued support.”
Eden Figueroa, lead principal investigator for SCY-QNet as well as Presidential Innovation Endowed Professor at Stony Brook and director of the Center for Distributed Quantum Processing, highlighted contributions from all partner institutions: “I would like to kindly thank the team of investigators and students in all our partner institutions that have been working really hard during the pilot phase of the project. Thanks to their efforts we were able to demonstrate simultaneous entanglement distribution across Long Island, from Brooklyn to Stony Brook and from Stony Brook to Commack via Brookhaven National Laboratory, and to set the path to quantum connect to Columbia and Yale. These experiments were the basis of our successful application for the Design Phase of the NQVL project.”
Figueroa also noted broader engagement through outreach events: “With partners like SUNY, The Ohio State University, the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the Great Plains Network, NIST, NASA, IBM, Cisco, and JP Morgan Chase, we are now preparing a large collaboration that will start designing the future quantum internet of the US and its new applications,” he said.
“These quantum education and training initiatives are doing more than just building the future quantum workforce,” added Nina Maung-Gaona, senior associate vice president for research and innovation. “They’re cultivating an innovation ecosystem right here in the greater NY area — one that will catalyze a new era of scientific discovery and economic leadership.”
In this phase of development, SCY-QNet will work with industry partners such as Toptica, Single Quantum, Aliro, and Qunnect. The focus is on enhancing devices used in quantum networks so they can support advanced features such as privacy-preserving long-distance communication using entanglement. The planned network infrastructure could help lay groundwork for secure communications between critical systems such as power generation facilities on Long Island.
The project also anticipates developing teleportation-based data transfer between sectors like healthcare or finance using remote matter-matter entanglement synchronized with classical networks. Future goals include creating entangled atomic clock networks among collaborating universities; these could improve global positioning system security or enable new types of physics experiments.
Key technical challenges include establishing heralded quantum memories throughout Long Island/New York City; deploying robust repeaters capable of sustaining entanglement across fiber links longer than 350 kilometers; developing atom-based qubit processors at key sites; converting SCY-QNet into shared infrastructure supported by classical networking services; enabling resource sharing among multiple users; supporting virtual laboratory operations at national/international scale; fostering experimental research leading toward technological advances.
Education initiatives tied into SCY-QNet seek to develop universal curricula reaching high school through graduate levels across SUNY campuses while promoting continuing education options within existing STEM fields—supporting both workforce growth locally in Greater New York Area research/innovation clusters.
