Top row: Alex Frañó, Fang Liu, Yao Wang, Timothy Su, Xueyue (Sherry) Zhang, Ceren Dag. 2nd row: Elizabeth Goldschmidt, Luis Jáuregui, Youn Jue (Eunice) Bae, Serena Eley, Kazuki Ikeda. 3rd row: Sandhya Susarla, Ruijuan Xu, Yonglong Xie, Fabio Anza, Hendrik Utzat, Lilia Xie.
Research Corporation for Science Advancement, The Brinson Foundation, Simons Foundation, and independent philanthropist Kevin Wells have awarded funding to seven cross-disciplinary teams of researchers in the inaugural year of Scialog: Quantum Matter and Information, a three-year initiative aiming to promote broader interactions among different sectors of the quantum science community and spark interdisciplinary projects to enhance our understanding of the quantum world.
Each of the 19 individual awards is $60,000 in direct costs.
“It’s a remarkable time for major advances in quantum materials and information, and Fellows at this Scialog are in the thick of it,” said RCSA President & CEO Eric Isaacs. “The ideas that come out of this initiative could be game-changing.”
Isaacs highlighted how the recent Nobel Prize in physics, for work demonstrating that quantum phenomenon could be observed at a macroscopic scale, showed the transformative importance of basic research. “It wasn’t just a beautiful sequence of laboratory observations, but something that is becoming realized for computing, and addressing some of the most pressing challenges of our time.”
He also drew a connection to this year’s Nobel Prize in economics, which explained how new technology can drive sustained growth through “creative destruction.” Isaacs said that both prizes illustrate how science and technology don’t just change how we think but fundamentally transform culture, society, and the economy.
He said that advances in quantum science and quantum technologies, spanning everything from computing to biology to sensing to communication, are moving at an incredible pace. While discovery has been largely serendipitous, he said one goal of this Scialog is to bring researchers from key disciplines (synthesis to systems) together to think broadly and advance a more predictive, systematic approach to design experiments with clearer expectations of results.
Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog program aims to accelerate breakthroughs by building creative networks of scientists from the United States and Canada that cross disciplinary silos, and by stimulating intensive conversation around scientific themes of global importance.
Coinciding with the United Nations’ proclamation of 2025 as the “International Year of Quantum Science and Technology,” the inaugural conference was held October 16-19, 2025, in Tucson, Arizona. The meeting engaged 57 early career researchers from a cross-section of disciplines — physics, chemistry, materials science, surface science, applied mathematics, computer science, and engineering — in a series of conversations to encourage collaboration across silos and create a better networked quantum community ready to advance the field.
The conference’s first keynote speaker, Rana Adhikari, California Institute of Technology, kicked off the morning’s discussions with his talk, “The Angst and Ennui of Measuring Zero.”
Adhikari, whose research focuses on precision measurement related to surpassing the fundamental physics limits to discover new phenomena in gravity and quantum mechanics as part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project, described how random and systematic noise is reduced in gravitational wave detectors and proposed better methods for the future.
He shared insights on the evolution of gravitational wave detection and emphasized the challenges of reducing noise in LIGO detectors, including the use of frequency-dependent squeezing and deep learning for feedback control. He also noted the unexpected high frequency of binary black hole detections compared to neutron star mergers, and the potential for future advancements in quantum gravity experiments.
Xiaoyang Zhu, Columbia University, gave the second keynote talk of the conference, “Fractional Charges and Where to Find Them.”
Zhu discussed time-domain pump-probe spectroscopy as the most sensitive experimental approach yet in detecting quantum phases, likening its results to time-lapsed treasure maps that can be used to find fractional charge states in rich moiré systems.
He explained how high magnetic fields in two-dimensional electron gases create fractional charges, leading to phenomena like the fractional quantum Hall effect, and highlighted the discovery of these effects in twisted bilayer graphene, which can exhibit fractional charges without magnetic fields. He also discussed ongoing research to improve sample quality and reduce defect densities.
Along with Adhikari and Zhu, an expert group of scientists served as Facilitators to guide discussions at the conference. They included: Nathaniel Gabor, University of California Riverside; Nancy Makri, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Carlos Meriles, City College of New York; Stephen Leone, University of California, Berkeley, Cindy Regal. University of Colorado Boulder; and Lea Santos, University of Connecticut.
During the conference, Fellows met in a series of small- and medium-sized breakout groups designed to maximize interaction with other scientists from different fields and approaches. They were challenged to identify bottlenecks to progress in our understanding of the quantum world and to brainstorm potential areas of inquiry where new, cross-disciplinary research is needed.
Participants are encouraged to get to know each other and their work, and to envision what it would look like to collaborate, how they could leverage their different approaches and methods, and what novel problems they could investigate together. On the final morning, teams that came together during the previous three days made brief proposal pitches for high-risk, high-potential projects they had brainstormed at the conference.
Collaboration among science funders is as important to Scialog initiatives as fostering collaborative science, and representatives from RCSA’s funding partners were in attendance.
Jamie Bender, Senior Program Officer at The Brinson Foundation, said at the conference that her organization was interested in being part of this particular Scialog initiative because advances in quantum science research are likely to inform several areas of science they support and further scientific discovery overall.
The second meeting of Scialog: Quantum Matter and Information is scheduled for October 15-18, 2026. Applications to participate in the 2026 meeting will be considered until April 1, 2026.
The following QMI teams will receive 2025 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards:
Quantum Differential Spectroscopy: Mapping Entanglement in Solids
- Alex Frañó
Physics
University of California, San Diego - Fang Liu
Chemistry
Stanford University - Yao Wang
Chemistry
Emory University
Spin-Photon Interfaces in Molecular Silicon Clusters
- Timothy Su
Chemistry
University of California, Riverside - Xueyue (Sherry) Zhang
Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
Columbia University
Quantum Sensing from Within: Optical Defects as Internal Probes of Correlation
- Ceren Dag
Physics
Indiana University Bloomington - Elizabeth Goldschmidt
Physics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Luis Jáuregui
Physics and Astronomy
University of California, Irvine - Alex Frañó 1
Physics
University of California, San Diego
Quantum Entanglement of Skyrmion-Antiskyrmion Pairs
- Youn Jue (Eunice) Bae
Chemistry
Cornell University - Serena Eley
Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Washington - Kazuki Ikeda
Physics
University of Massachusetts Boston
Terahertz Quantum Interconnects Via Reconfigurable Ferron Networks
- Fang Liu
Chemistry
Stanford University - Sandhya Susarla
School of Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy
Arizona State University - Ruijuan Xu
Materials Science and Engineering
North Carolina State University
Visualizing Entanglement of Fractional Excitations with Scanning Charge-Noise Spectroscopy
- Yao Wang
Chemistry
Emory University - Yonglong Xie
Physics and Astronomy
Rice University
Loss of Photonic Entanglement: A Novel Probe of Classical and Quantum Spin Dynamics in Materials
- Fabio Anza
Physics / Cybersecurity Institute
University of Maryland, Baltimore County - Hendrik Utzat
Chemistry
University of California, Berkeley - Lilia Xie
Chemistry/Princeton Materials Institute
Princeton University