It was just recently announced that Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech will be adding an extra letter to its name. The former IQI will now be the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, or IQIM. But it isn’t the name change that is of real significance, but rather the $12.6 million of funding over the next five years that comes with it!
In fact, the IQIM is an NSF funded Physics Frontier Center, which means the competition was stiff, to say the least. New PFCs are only funded by the NSF every three years, and are chosen based on “their potential for transformational advances in the most promising research areas at the intellectual frontiers of physics.”
In practice, the new center means that the Caltech quantum info effort will continue to grow and, importantly, it will better integrate and expand on experimental efforts there. It looks like an exciting new chapter for quantum information science at Caltech, even if the new name is harder to pronounce. Anyone who wants to become a part of it should check out the open postdoc positions that are now available at the IQIM.
O brave new quantum world!
According to CalTech’s press release the new center merges (1) the existing “Center for Exotic Quantum Systems” (CEQS) that was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, with (2) an existing NSF-sponsored “Institute for Quantum Information” (IQI), with these two now joined under the new aegis of an NSF Physics Frontiers Center named “The Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM)”, with a mandate “to push theoretical and experimental boundaries in the study of exotic quantum states” with a view toward “the potential for transformational advances.” The CalTech press release however is not specific regarding the IQIM team’s concrete research program.
Caltech! not CalTech 😉