Duality

Based in Chicago, the nation's quantum hub.

With a highly skilled talent base emerging from its world-class universities and state-of-the-art research and lab facilities, Chicago has the infrastructure to drive the future of quantum information science and engineering. There is a broad and diverse industry base with more than 30 Fortune 500 companies, including manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences, transportation and logistics, and financial tech and other industries where quantum science will have an impact.

The vibrant quantum science ecosystem in Chicago—and across the state of Illinois—has seen tremendous momentum and investment in recent years. In 2019, Governor J.B. Pritzker committed $200 million to establish Chicago as the world’s leading quantum hub. In 2020, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago launched a 52-mile “quantum loop” that was among the longest ground-based quantum communication channels in the country. In July 2020, officials from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced plans to build a national quantum internet. The following month, the DOE announced that two of the five federally-funded quantum information science research centers would be based in the greater Chicago area—including one led by Argonne National Laboratory and one led by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Additionally, one of the three National Science Foundation (NSF) quantum leap challenge institutes in the U.S. is led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Duality startups become immersed in Chicago's quantum community, connecting with experts across academia, industry, and government. Cohort participants have the opportunity to gain critical business resources to accelerate their technology development as well as opportunities to access state-of-the-art computing, materials processing, quantum measurement and other resources, subject to approval by the relevant facility, and compliance with its policies and procedures.

Below is a list of facilities and resources at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. For more detailed information about accessing the Argonne facilities, please visit this Engaging with Argonne National Laboratory FAQ page.

Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility

The University of Chicago Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility (PNF) at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) is an open-access, 10,000 square foot ISO Class 5 research cleanroom that provides advanced lithographic processing of hard and soft materials. This facility includes a full suite of optical and electron beam lithography tools; physical vapor deposition tools, including electron beam evaporators and sputter systems; atomic layer deposition; plasma etching tools using both fluorine and chlorine-based chemistries; tube furnaces for nitride and oxide growth as well as annealing; and wet benches to accommodate most wet processing needs. Inspection tools include scanning electron as well as advanced optical microscopy, profilometry, ellipsometry, and thin-film interferometry. Learn More.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility

The University of Chicago Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) facility in the Chemistry department supports the entire campus with access to equipment and free training for characterization of solutions of chemical compounds. Open to trained users 24/7, researchers operate equipment themselves and pay recharge fees for instrument time. Labs in three buildings primarily support synthetic chemistry, but other applications are very welcome. The Searle and Gordon Center NMR labs house two 400 MHz automated spectrometers and three manually-operated 500 MHz instruments. One instrument features an optical apparatus for NMR monitoring of photochemical reactions. The Searle lab features a small wet lab enabling titrations and kinetics/reaction monitoring. There is also an electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) instrument (X-band with cryocooler) in the Jones building for studying paramagnetic compounds. Off-campus users can be accommodated with special arrangement. Learn More.

MRSEC Shared Facility

The University of Chicago MRSEC maintains a robust set of Shared Research Facilities with resources for creating, characterizing, measuring, and imaging many types of hard and soft materials. All Facilities are open-access and available to any interested internal or external user from academia, industry, or elsewhere. Instrumentation includes tools for microscopy (scanning electron, scanning probe, optical metrology), X-ray and ultra-high speed imaging, spectroscopy (EDS, Raman, fluorescence, ellipsometry, spectrophotometry), rheometry, thermal processing, surface preparation & characterization, low temperature magnetic and electrical characterization, and digital fabrication including 3D printers, laser and waterjet cutters, and a full student shop. Computational resources include COMSOL. Learn More.

X-Ray Research Facility

The University of Chicago X-ray Research Facility provides access to the state-of-the-art X-ray diffraction, scattering, and spectroscopy techniques. They perform routine and non-routine small-molecule single-crystal X-ray structure determination and X-ray powder diffraction analysis for a variety of samples. Small angle scattering techniques can be used to probe a broad range of particle sizes starting from a few nanometers. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy is utilized for analysis of the surface chemistry and X-ray fluorescence is used for elemental analysis of bulk materials. Learn More.

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at Argonne National Laboratory, enables breakthroughs in science and engineering by providing supercomputing resources and expertise to research programs, and is the future home of Argonne’s first exascale system, Aurora. Supported by the DOE's Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF and its partner organization, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, operate leadership-class supercomputers that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the systems typically used for open science. Additionally, the ALCF’s Theta/ThetaGPU supercomputer performs complex and diverse workloads, integrating data analytics with AI training and learning into a single platform. Learn More.

Advanced Photon Source

The DOE’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems. The APS includes insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS. Learn More.

Center for Nanoscale Materials

The Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) at Argonne is a DOE Office of Science Nanoscale Science Research Center dedicated to nanoscience and nanotechnology. From X-ray microscopy that uses the power of the Advanced Photon Source to clean room-based nanofabrication techniques, the CNM provides a powerful combination of scientific resources. The CNM houses resources that enable electron paramagnetic resonance measurements of spin-dependent phenomena, a dilution refrigerator for measurements at the milli-Kelvin level, magneto-electro-optical spectrometer and magneto-optical photoluminescence microscope, and a JEOL JBX-8100FS electron beam writer with <10 nm resolution for device fabrication. A Quantum Entanglement and Transduction laboratory is being assembled in the CNM. When complete, the laboratory will house tools for characterizing non-classical photon sources, quantum entanglement, and magneto-optical single spin responses. This effort will also result in the installation of an adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator for ease of access to milli-Kelvin temperatures. Learn More.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Bardeen Quad

The engineering quadrangle, stretching from Engineering Hall to the Grainger Engineering Library, is named in honor of John Bardeen, the only person to win the Nobel Prize twice in the same field, physics.

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