A Legacy of Quantum

By Jess Stallone

While technology rapidly evolves, it is physics — most recently quantum physics — that periodically sparks advances, fundamentally revolutionizing every facet of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Backed by decades of pioneering research, a $300 million investment by New York state and a recent multidisciplinary focus on Quantum Information Science and Technology (QIST),  the State University of New York at Stony Brook is poised to lead the wireless expansion of America’s largest quantum network, standing on the brink of another major breakthrough.

The current, most significant implication for humanity would be unlocking ultra-secure, lightning-fast, next-gen computing and communication power that will revolutionize everything on the internet, from data availability, financial security, business applications, national security and beyond. 

“We are building an internet protected by physics,” said Eden Figueroa, Stony Brook Presidential Innovation Endowed Professor and director of the Center for Distributed Quantum Processing.

In recognition of the potential of this work, the university has secured funding to support the creation of a new Quantum Research and Innovation Hub and ensure the sustained development of the quantum network. In September 2025, the Department of Physics and Astronomy received two key awards: a $300 million investment from New York state and a $4 million National Science Foundation grant.

Drawing on her experience as a former CEO of two wireless communications companies, Stony Brook President Andrea Goldsmith stated, “When I think about where wireless was in the late 1980s, I see a clear parallel to where quantum communication is today. It seemed like magic then, and we are creating that magic here at Stony Brook. This free-space channel is a breakthrough that validates the big, bold vision of our researchers, affirming our role as the flagship of the State University of New York system that is leading the world into the quantum information age.”

Reflecting on the discoveries that led to this moment in history, we begin with the establishment of Stony Brook University in 1957 and the appointment of the first physics professor in 1958 – a foundational period that began just 30 years after Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein first debated quantum mechanics. Though the formal Department of Physics first appeared in the 1960-61 Undergraduate Bulletin, its 68-year history has been continually fueled by top physicists like Chang Kee Jung, Chen Ning Yang, Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, Dmitri Kharzeev, Hal Metcalf, James Lukens, Vladimir Korepin and Eden Figueroa, researchers have been theorizing supergravity, discovering new laws of physics with an Electron-Ion Collider, unearthing the immobilization of atoms using laser cooling, building a device to put billions of electrons into a state of superposition, pioneering room-temperature quantum memory, achieving light-speed precision with atomic interfaces, experimenting with the longest wireless quantum connection, and hypothecating critical breakthroughs to improve data loss over long distances.

“We often forget how miraculous a rise it has been for physics at Stony Brook,” said Jung, SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, reflecting on the department’s ascension within the nation’s largest comprehensive state university system. “With the daring action by the early university leadership, C.N. Yang’s courageous move and deep vision, many brilliant minds who took chances at Stony Brook for excellence, and timely and critical support by the Simons Foundation, the department has flourished and became a world leading department in a relatively short period of time.”

Peter van Nieuwenhuizen at the blackboard.

THEORY
In 1966, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Chen Ning Yang, who passed away in October 2025, was recruited by Stony Brook to serve as the first director of the newly founded Institute for Theoretical Physics, which later became known as the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Nearly a decade later, Yang recruited Peter van Nieuwenhuizen to Stony Brook University in 1975. Just a year after his arrival, while a professor at Stony Brook, van Nieuwenhuizen co-developed the groundbreaking theory of supergravity, which reconciles gravity within a quantum mechanical framework. This theoretical construction later won the highly coveted Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2020.

“The proof is there; the theory exists, mathematically everything is clear. The prize is for the theoretical work we did,” stated van Nieuwenhuizen in an SBU News interview. “But it is not clear if this is a theory of nature. Only when supersymmetric particles are discovered will our theory become physical reality. I’ve always ended my articles with ‘Let us hope that nature is aware of our efforts.'”

Often thought to be defined by immutable laws, physics can even self-correct foundational principles at moments of discovery, which is exemplified by the work of Dmitri Kharzeev, distinguished professor of physics at SBU and distinguished scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).

In 2017, Kharzeev began his research, focusing on the link between entanglement and thermalization. His efforts, alongside Stony Brook’s unique partnership with BNL and its major project, the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), led to their fundamental re-understanding of statistical physics by establishing that thermal equilibrium is a consequence of maximal quantum entanglement. 

Directly informing ongoing research in quantum computing and quantum AI, Dmitri’s research is essential to understanding the root of entanglement and its relationship to thermal behavior. By re-evaluating experimental observations, researchers are able to correct for errors and build functional quantum processors. 

As Kharzeev notes about this endless pursuit, “There is no end to physics. So you kind of get deeper and you come up with new questions, but along the way you produce some useful things that mankind benefits from.”

Stony Brook University’s own Hal Metcalf, a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Physics, holds up the very first photo of a frozen atom, captured with his groundbreaking 1979 machine that is now housed at the Smithsonian, which he carries with him every day.

EXPERIMENT
In order to begin experimenting, technology needed to catch up with the theory that had been proposed in the early discovery of quantum mechanics. It was in the years of Hal Metcalf, Distinguished Teaching Professor of physics, where experiments began to unfold.

After his early work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hal teamed up with a physicist working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) named William Phillips on a project he initially thought impossible. Phillips, who later went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, explained that just as a refrigerator uses an energy source to freeze, they needed to invent the machine to effectively power laser cooling, which would groundbreakingly immobilize an atom. Metcalf recounted, “And in those 10 seconds, I was convinced.”

His breakthrough machine, built at Stony Brook University in 1979, used a specialized magnet to compensate for the Doppler shift, a change in wave frequency relative to motion. This technique precisely freezes atoms, preventing collisions and, in turn, minimizing data loss. Nearly winning the Nobel Prize in 1997, Metcalf’s foundational ideas and his machine were instrumental to the field. That original machine is currently housed at the Smithsonian Institution, and the principles behind it paved the way for the development of quantum memory technology.

Reflecting on how he positioned himself for such pioneering discoveries, Metcalf recalled a piece of advice shared by Steven Chu, Nobel Prize laureate and former U.S. secretary of energy under President Barack Obama: “You have to be smart and also you have to be lucky. If you can’t have both, always choose lucky.”

The next revolutionary physics experiment at Stony Brook to make national headlines was conducted within the next 20 years and published in Nature in 2000. James Lukens, SBU Professor Emeritus, Physics and Astronomy, and his team created a device called a superconducting resonator as a proof experiment nicknamed Schrödinger’s SQUID, playing off of the 1935 Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. The “squid” in this case is the superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), which is the core of the resonator. In bringing a quantum paradox out of a thought experiment and into the lab, the electrical current of billions of electrons composing the device are placed into a superposition state, paving the way for more robust and powerful quantum systems.

From the superposition of a single subatomic particle puzzling the world to an experiment that has scaled to billions, the device unlocked the possibilities to come, creating a limitless flow of information.

”I think most physicists, including myself, would be extremely surprised if quantum mechanics did fail for large objects,” Lukens said in a New York Times article following the experimental discovery. But, he added, ”Every so often we are surprised.”

One day, theory and experiment may come together to prove that the physics of large and small objects are one and the same. Until then, SBU’s quantum journey continues under the leadership of the current lead researcher at Stony Brook University, Eden Figueroa.

In 2003, Figueroa began his quantum memory experiment at the University of Konstanz in Germany and later at the Institute for Quantum Information Science at the University of Calgary, Canada, before joining the Stony Brook Department of Physics and Astronomy. At Stony Brook, he developed patented, scalable, room-temperature quantum memories and entanglement sources, achieving the information storage of a photon’s polarization (or rotation) within an atom and later retrieved. 

Figueroa, who was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2025 for his work and his patents in the field of quantum memory, is joined by 20 leading researchers at Stony Brook tasked with solving quantum communication’s greatest unanswered questions. 

A significant challenge in quantum memory is decoherence, where interaction with the environment — often thermal or collision — causes data loss in the atom, which usually requires atoms to be cooled to near absolute zero. Figueroa’s breakthrough, for which he holds patents, is in developing room-temperature quantum memory by coordinating the triangulation of the photons that hit the atom with distinctive time synchronization.

“Simulations offer one path to understanding complex systems through computer models, but I prefer to experiment,” explained Figueroa. “Building things first provides an intuition for how they operate through experimental knowledge.”

QUANTUM INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Though SBU’s quantum journey is just starting to get exciting, the university has been pushing discovery in many ways for decades. In May 2003, Stony Brook University hosted the Simons Conference on Quantum and Reversible Computation, led by Vladimir E. Korepin, professor at the C.N. Yang Institute of Theoretical Physics. This pivotal gathering brought together experts in mathematics, physics and computer science, forging the collaborative spirit that is the very heart of Stony Brook’s work today.

A group photo of participants at the Simons Conference on Quantum and Reversible Computation, held at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, N.Y., May 29, 2003, bringing together cross-disciplinary experts in mathematics, physics and computer science to discuss quantum information and computation.

It is this unique teamwork — with computer scientists, engineers, physicists, philosophers and many others — that makes the impossible possible, proving that the multidisciplinary application of QIST is the true key to success.

In 2024, Stony Brook reached a pivotal point where photons send and atoms store information, a moment in history when technology and theory synchronized, and the multidisciplinary application of Quantum Information Science and Technology (QIST), a field challenging the limits of classical technology through quantum discovery, began to unfold. 

This set the stage for a long-distance Bell experiment, which involves an entanglement source shooting two entangled photons through a wired, fiber-optic connection in separate directions toward two atoms. These atoms store the information, which is then retrieved and recorded in a histogram to prove entangled quantum communication.

This type of experiment requires a cross-disciplinary collaboration, said Dimitrios Katramatos, a computer scientist and staff scientist with joint appointment at both Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory. “It takes a close collaboration of different disciplines that can work together on intricate details of the network, especially on commercial equipment being used over long distances that was never meant to work like this before.”

Katramatos, who specializes in computer science, designed the remote control mechanisms for the optical electronics to triangulate photon direction to record precise measurement and perform quantum memory storage.

The three-location quantum communication network, first established in 2018 at Stony Brook connecting the Physics Building with the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology and the Educational Communications Center building, laid crucial groundwork and resulted in entanglement swapping experiments that would continue to expand the network. 

“From the earliest theoretical advances in supergravity to today’s experimental breakthroughs in quantum communication, Stony Brook has consistently been a place where the boundaries of physics are pushed forward,” said Kevin Gardner, vice president for Research and Innovation at Stony Brook University. “With the state of New York’s historic investment and the dedication of our faculty, students and partners, we are contributing to the global scientific enterprise and laying the foundation for the world’s first truly secure and scalable quantum internet. This work exemplifies how discovery at Stony Brook can shape the technologies that will define the future.”

Subsequently, the experiment was expanded in a collaborative effort with Brookhaven National Laboratory, and in 2023, the networks were connected to a public data center in Commack and a quantum processing unit at Columbia University. Within the same year, an experiment was conducted that connected time synchronization measurements to America’s largest quantum network – a 275-kilometer, wired fiber-optic system now being expanded wirelessly.

Figueroa recalled a breakthrough moment, stating he called Chase Wallace, a PhD researcher on the team, exclaiming, “We might actually pull this off,” Figueroa said. “Up until that time, we didn’t know because it had never been done before in history,” in both distance and the measurement capabilities required to prove entanglement.

Through this network in a groundbreaking experiment in 2024, the researchers produced tens of thousands of entangled photon pairs per second over a few hours and repeated the experiment thousands of times in one week. As a result, Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory successfully proved entanglement within their quantum communication network.

“If you start thinking about it and how it might not work, then you will never do it,” said Figueroa. “So I’ve always [thought]: Measure first, think later.”

Stony Brook is now a crucial part of an expansion project that includes a wireless quantum communication channel. 

As a collaborative effort, Stony Brook is building a free-space optics telescope that will wirelessly connect SBU, Brookhaven National Lab and Yale University between rooftops. 

According to Rishikesh Gokhale, a PhD candidate at Stony Brook working on the free space telescope with specialization in classical and quantum optics, “We are literally laying the groundwork for a future quantum internet, where information can be transmitted securely and instantaneously over vast distances. Being part of a team that blends cutting-edge quantum physics with real-world engineering is both challenging and deeply rewarding.”

Stony Brook’s telescope is currently being built in the Physics Building on West Campus and will be transported to the roof of the Health Sciences Center on the university’s East Campus by the Spring 2026 semester. 

“Stony Brook is the place where breakthroughs have been made and many top researchers have wished to come,” said Department of Physics and Astronomy Chair Chang Kee Jung. “With the continuing strong and strategic support from the New York state, the department is poised to make even greater advances, such as realizing quantum internet.”

To stay informed about SBU’s quantum research, please visit stonybrook.edu/quantum.