University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

New Capabilities

Host institution for the research

For years, predictions about how silicon carbide defects shed energy didn't match experiments. University of Chicago researchers now know why. A process called internal conversion, where energy dissipates as atomic vibrations rather than light, plays a far bigger role than earlier models accounted for.

Updated Oct 24

New Capabilities

As of September 2026: Lead academic institution for the study

Researchers have shown that exotic quasiparticles called non-Abelian anyons can perform every operation a general-purpose quantum computer needs. Using 54 entangled qubits on Quantinuum's H2 trapped-ion processor, a team from the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stony Brook University, and Quantinuum combined two operations, braiding and fusion, to reach universal computation for the first time in a non-Abelian code.

Updated Sep 26

New Capabilities

As of May 2026: Leading energy storage research

On December 29, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory researchers published findings in Nature Nanotechnology that flip battery science on its head. Single-crystal lithium-ion batteries, designed to avoid the grain-boundary cracking that plagued older batteries, are failing anyway — for the exact opposite reason scientists expected.

Updated May 18