Florida State University announced it will build a campus-scale quantum communication testbed with $2.1 million in federal Community Project Funding, administered through the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The planned network will connect a central quantum communication hub in FSU’s Interdisciplinary Research and Commercialization Building with receiver nodes at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. FSU will connect the three Tallahassee, Fla., sites through campus fiber.

FSU said the testbed will generate and distribute entangled photons while researchers monitor measures such as link reliability to improve performance. The testbed’s reconfigurable optical links will support experiments under strong air turbulence, high magnetic fields and cryogenic thermal cycling.

Those environmental stresses are where the testbed goes beyond a conventional laboratory setup. Quantum communication systems can work in highly controlled laboratory environments, but deployment requires optical links, detectors and other components to maintain performance as operating conditions change. The FSU testbed will let researchers study some of those effects under controlled conditions before broad deployment.

Suvranu De, dean of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, described reliability outside the lab as a key engineering challenge, saying the next step is determining how to “make these systems reliable in the environments where they will ultimately operate.”

One of the receiver nodes will be located at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, or MagLab, the world’s largest and highest-powered magnet laboratory, according to the facility. The MagLab houses several world-record magnets, including a 35-ton, 22-foot-tall hybrid magnet that holds the world record for a continuous-field user magnet at 45 tesla. That makes the facility an unusually demanding test environment for studying how quantum communication hardware and optical links perform under strong magnetic fields.

The testbed adds to several recent federal quantum research projects involving FSU. In July, the Department of Energy selected the university to lead four projects under its Genesis Mission, including work using AI to diagnose errors in quantum computers and a separate project combining AI and quantum computing to study atomic nuclei and other quantum systems.

Wei Guo, co-director of the FSU Quantum Initiative and head of the MagLab’s cryogenics lab, said the new testbedwill lay the groundwork for larger quantum networking efforts while giving students and researchers practical experience across the full quantum networking stack, from photons and detectors to controls, data and networking.

FSU’s announcement did not include a construction schedule, expected completion date or performance targets for the testbed.