Quantum Builders
Building Quantum Advantage: Inside Brookhaven’s Quantum Ecosystem
A fireside chat with:
Charles (Chuck) Black
This article is based on a conversation between Chuck Black and Daniel Rodán Legrain as part of the Quantum Builders series, sponsored by Qblox. Watch the full webinar for more on national lab user facilities, co-design, and what the Genesis mission could mean for quantum.
Black studied superconductivity in the 1990s, then spent a decade at Yorktown learning how science works inside a technology company. The lesson that shaped everything after was about scale.
"To do something really important, like a technology, you cannot do it yourself," he said. "You have to work together." Yorktown had experts of every kind, and the person down the hall knew things he had never heard of. Microelectronics happened because all of them did their part.
He carries that into how he thinks about a career. "We could all be happy doing our little thing and writing our papers," he said, "but don't we want more than that?" His answer is that nobody sits on their porch later remembering a small paper. They remember being part of something that changed what was possible.
When the National Quantum Initiative was taking shape in 2018 and 2019, Black was directing the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, and some of his scientists were uneasy about what it meant for them. "Should I go take a class on qubits? I don't know what a qubit is. Should I be nervous?" is how he describes the mood.
The center's answer was to stay in its lane and push harder on it. "We doubled down that we're a materials lab. We know about materials," he said. Talking to people across the field confirmed the instinct, because a large share of the open problems in quantum information science come back to material quality. Brookhaven competed for one of the five DOE centers in 2020 and won the lead role on C2QA.
Asked what makes a facility like CFN valuable to the quantum community, Black gives the obvious answer first and then dismisses it. The instrument list is excellent. Plenty of places have excellent instruments.
What sets the DOE facilities apart is the staffing model. Scientists there spend half their time on their own research and the other half helping visiting users. "We don't just show you the laser and then say good luck," he said. "You're working with someone who deeply understands the technique that you want to use."
He asks people to sit with how demanding that job is. "We need you to be the best at what you do. We need you to write papers on your research. We need you to get the invited talks," he said of the first half. Then a beginning student knocks on the door with a basic question. "You have to set aside that you're the super important scientist and say, you know what, now my job is to help this person."
The result, in his view, is a community selected for competence and generosity at once. "You know X, I know Y. Let's work together and do something that neither of us could do on our own."
Black is direct about the perception problem. "The labs can be mysterious places and kind of scary in some ways," he said, describing gates, forms, and remote locations that read as barriers before anyone has tried.
The mindset shift matters more than the paperwork. "These are meant to be places for all of us," he said. "Regardless of who you are, regardless of where you come from, these are for you." Access to the capabilities carries no cost once you arrive. "You do have to get yourself here, but once you're here, access to the capabilities is free."
For groups weighing whether to engage, his advice is to start with a conversation rather than a form. Users are not required to talk to facility scientists before submitting a proposal, but the staff would prefer it. "There's no substitute for talking to people," he said, both to test whether the fit is right and to navigate the process.
C2QA works differently from CFN. Rather than a facility in one place, it is a collaboration among 28 national lab, university, and industry partners, centered in the Northeast but not limited to it. DOE renewed the five national quantum centers last fall for another five years.
The research splits into two connected thrusts. The first is making the components of quantum systems work better. Black is careful to credit how far the field has come while being clear about the gap. "There are many things that quantum systems could do if qubits worked even better," he said. The center emphasizes superconducting qubits alongside efforts in diamond systems and neutral atoms, with the materials science concentrated on superconductors and diamond.
The second thrust is the architecture underneath scalability. "Ultimately any scalable system is going to have to be some sort of modular architecture," he said, because every platform hits a physical limit on how many qubits fit in one place. That opens questions about interconnects, software, and system design.
The two halves constrain each other. "The demands of the architecture ultimately determine the level of performance of the components and vice versa," he said.
Black splits co-design into two answers. The first is technical. Microelectronics built a formalism for developing hardware and software together "to achieve performance gains that couldn't be realized by each one working in isolation," and part of C2QA's work is porting that formalism to quantum. Specialists in the center translate between layers, telling materials scientists which measurements will matter to the people designing the architecture.
The second answer is blunter. "Sometimes people say co-design, but what they really mean is collaboration," he said.
Making that work across 28 institutions takes relationship building and shared targets. In its first five years, C2QA set a goal of improving superconducting qubit coherence time by an order of magnitude. Hitting it required materials scientists and transmon builders to design experiments together, pairing device layouts with materials measurements to work out what each processing choice had done. "I know I couldn't do it on my own and I know you couldn't do it on your own," he said. "So let's try and see if we can do it together."
On the Genesis mission, which aims to link quantum, AI, HPC, and scientific instruments into one discovery platform, Black is openly enthusiastic and honest that the definition is still forming. What appeals to him is the purpose. "It reminds me of one of those MC Escher drawings where it's like, we need all this really great science to build something for science."
He does not picture Genesis as something you log into. "I don't think any of us will sit down at Genesis and type into it," he said. The picture Brookhaven has been developing is what a colleague, Kevin Yager, named the exocortex, "the idea being that this machine now is kind of an extra layer of your brain."
In that version, you describe what you are interested in, then step away. Agents read papers, run simulations, and come back when a decision needs to be made. Black compares it to something familiar. "You may wake up in the morning and have a thought that you hadn't had," he said. "That's because your brain was working on it all night."
His test for whether the vision is right is whether it adds work. Another system to check would be a burden. Something that works while you do other things is not.
The building blocks already exist in pieces. He points to an instrument CFN operates at the NSLS-II synchrotron. "You talk to the beam line and you're like, hey, move my sample over by one millimeter and take a spectrum, and then it does it."
For a first visible win, he expects adoption to look gradual. AI tools went from writing novelty poems to contributing to theory papers within a few years, and he sees quantum approaching a similar threshold through work in C2QA and elsewhere on real hardware.
Black answers the workforce question by going back to microelectronics. In that era, anyone in electrical engineering or solid state physics knew where they wanted to be. "There was one thing that you wanted to do and that was go work in microelectronics," he said, because it combined hard science, fast progress, and real career opportunity.
He thinks quantum has the same ingredients and needs the same pull. "We need these future most talented scientists around to want to be working in this field," he said, and by his read on the students and postdocs coming out of C2QA groups, the field is doing reasonably well at it.
He also offers a reason for confidence, from his own experience. As a student he could work the quantum mechanics problems without believing the engineering would ever arrive. "I just never thought it'd be possible, but we can do it now."
Asked how Brookhaven is preparing for an ecosystem that includes sensing and networking alongside computation, Black offered the thing he wishes more people knew. Brookhaven and Stony Brook have built a large quantum communication network on Long Island, reaching through repeaters into Manhattan and extending north of the city, with a free-space demonstration across Long Island Sound into Connecticut close behind.
He also connects quantum computing back to Brookhaven's fundamental science mission. The lab runs the only operating particle collider in the United States, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, now being upgraded with an electron ring. The heavy ion collisions it studies are quantum mechanical events that classical computers cannot simulate, which makes them a natural early target for quantum simulation.
Black describes himself as optimistic by nature, and he does not pretend the surrounding conditions are easy. His argument is that the hardest problems in front of us are the kind science can address, and that none of them yield to individual effort.
The same holds for the thing his own center is chasing. Building a fault-tolerant quantum computer "requires a national quantum initiative, it requires a whole quantum ecosystem," he said, and it requires those parts to behave like a community rather than a set of separate programs.
That ecosystem view is where Qblox sits. Building quantum together means every layer of the stack doing its part, and our role is the control layer, qubit control and readout systems designed to scale with the research groups and national programs pushing toward fault tolerance. If your team is scaling a superconducting system or planning a modular architecture, we would be glad to talk.
Contact us to learn how Qblox supports research groups and national quantum centers.
