SBU-Led Team Receives $4M NSF Grant to Develop 10-Node Quantum Network

September 4, 2025
6 min read

A Stony Brook University-led team has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant supporting the National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NQVL) Quantum Testbeds.

Stony Brook’s award funds a project called SCY-QNet, which is building a 10-node quantum network connecting atomic quantum processing units at Stony Brook, Columbia, Yale and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

As part of a three-phase competitive funding opportunity, this award marks the second win for Stony Brook University and its partners. Advancing to Phase II of the NQVL program resulted in an award of $4M to be distributed over two years.

Scy-qnet
The NSF NQVL project SCY-QNet. In the design phase, the current entanglement distribution network connecting laboratories and data centers across Long Island will be converted into a quantum repeater system. Entanglement generated at Brookhaven Laboratory and the Long Island Interconnect Data Center in Westbury, will be fed into atomic quantum memory systems located at the RICOH Data Center in Commack, Stony Brook University, and Qunnect, Inc. in Brooklyn. Using the procedure known as entanglement swapping, entanglement will be extended across 270 km, connecting Eastern Long Island to New York City. Finally, atomic-based sensors and clocks will be added to the network at locations in Columbia and Stony Brook. SCY-QNet will be a first example of a virtual quantum laboratory that will be accessed remotely via the Stony Brook Quantum Network Control Center. Credit: Leonardo Castillo Veneros, Stony Brook University

Selection for this Quantum Science and Technology Demonstration (QSTD) project required the success of the pilot project, and submission of a four-part proposal. Additionally, the competition also included a two-day interview process with a committee of Quantum Information Science and Technology (QIST) experts and NSF program managers.

“This award puts Stony Brook and our collaborators solidly in a national leadership position for quantum networking and communication,” said Stony Brook Vice President for Research and Innovation Kevin Gardner. “Our goal continues to be that Long Island and New York will be the birthplace of the new, secure quantum internet and the team of scientists and engineers that are responsible for the success of Phase 1 are second to none and deserve our recognition, praise, and continued support.”

“I would like to kindly thank the team of investigators and students in all our partner institutions that have been working really hard during the pilot phase of the project,” said Professor Eden Figueroa, the project’s lead principal investigator, as well as Stony Brook Presidential Innovation Endowed Professor and director of the Center for Distributed Quantum Processing. “Thanks to their efforts we were able to demonstrate simultaneous entanglement distribution across Long Island, from Brooklyn to Stony Brook and from Stony Brook to Commack via Brookhaven National Laboratory, and to set the path to quantum connect to Columbia and Yale. These experiments were the basis of our successful application for the Design Phase of the NQVL project.”

Figueroa added that the team also organized a large Quantum Networks Town Hall in New York City, in which the national and international community showed their support for the SCY-QNet concept. “With partners like SUNY, The Ohio State University, the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the Great Plains Network, NIST, NASA, IBM, Cisco, and JP Morgan Chase, we are now preparing a large collaboration that will start designing the future quantum internet of the US and its new applications,” he said.

“These quantum education and training initiatives are doing more than just building the future quantum workforce,” said Nina Maung-Gaona, senior associate vice president for research and innovation. “They’re cultivating an innovation ecosystem right here in the greater NY area — one that will catalyze a new era of scientific discovery and economic leadership.”

In this second design phase, the SCY-QNet project will leverage strong partnerships with quantum companies such as Toptica, Single Quantum, Aliro, and Qunnect, to enhance the capabilities and increase the capacity of quantum networks devices and systems. In this new phase, SCY-QNet will evolve from a network enabling privacy-preserving long-distance communication using entanglement to an advanced networked system of entangled quantum memories and quantum processors.

This framework will be used to run state-of-the-art quantum experiments, including secret-key sharing protocols, laying the groundwork for unhackable communication, for example, between power generation systems across Long Island. Additionally, the team envisions the construction of teleportation-based communication systems that use remote matter-matter entanglement in conjunction with time-synchronized classical networks to teleport critical data between institutions, for example, in the health and financial sectors. Furthermore, together with Stony Brook’s partners, Columbia and Yale, the team foresees the development of networks of entangled atomic-based clocks, whose exquisite time precision can be used to achieve a new global, more secure GPS system, as well as to probe fundamental physics.

This evolution is anchored on three key scientific challenges essential to scale SCY-QNet capabilities:

1. Developing banks of heralded quantum memories across Long Island and New York City

2. Developing robust quantum repeater systems, allowing robust entanglement to reach from Eastern Long Island to New York City, across a fiber network of more than 350 kilometers

3. Developing quantum processing units with atom-based qubits at Columbia, Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In this phase of the project, the team will convert SCY-QNet into a configurable, shared infrastructure. At SCY-QNet’s core lies a state-of-the-art classical network that provides all necessary services to orchestrate the collaboration of numerous devices and equipment and enable quantum operations.

The SCY-QNet testbed will be the foundation of a virtual laboratory and will evolve to national and/or international scale, supporting multiple users to safely and securely share resources and conduct experimental work, leading to new quantum science discoveries, and becoming the proving ground for the development and evaluation of new technologies.

SCY-QNet also includes initiatives to develop a novel QIST curriculum through a broad network of partner institutions, including many SUNY campuses. The team will create a universal curriculum to teach quantum at the high-school, undergraduate and graduate level, as well as developing multiple avenues for quantum literacy for the already existing STEM workforce. Additionally, the team envisions growing a collaborative quantum ecosystem in the Greater New York Area that supports research, training and innovation.