Turning crystal flaws into quantum highways: a new route towards scalable solid-state qubits

Building large-scale quantum technologies requires reliable ways to connect individual quantum bits (qubits) without destroying their fragile quantum states. In a new theoretical study, published in npj Computational Materials researchers show that crystal dislocations — line defects long regarded as imperfections — can instead serve as powerful building blocks for quantum interconnects.

Using advanced first-principles simulations, a team led by Prof. Maryam Ghazisaeidi at The Ohio State University and Prof. Giulia Galli at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and Chemistry Department demonstrated that nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, a leading solid-state qubit platform, can be attracted to dislocations and retain — and in some cases improve — their quantum properties when positioned near these line defects. 

“Because dislocations form quasi-one-dimensional (1D) structures extending through a crystal, they provide a natural scaffold for arranging qubits into ordered arrays,” said co-first author Cunzhi Zhang, a UChicago PME staff scientist in the Galli Group. 

Funded by the Air Force, this research brought together UChicago and Ohio State’s expertise in materials science, mechanical engineering, quantum information science and high-performance computing. 

The simulations carried out in the paper leveraged GPU-accelerated, massively parallel codes developed within the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials (MICCoM), a computational materials science center funded by the Department of Energy at Argonne National Laboratory and directed by Galli.

“These unprecedented large-scale first-principles calculations made it possible to accurately model the complex quantum properties of defects at 1D dislocation cores,” said co-first author Victor Yu, staff scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a MICCoM principal investigator.

The study revealed that many NV centers near dislocation cores remain stable in the desired charge and spin state and preserve a viable optical cycle, enabling optical initialization and readout of their spin states. 

“Importantly, we predicted that specific NV configurations near dislocations exhibit significantly enhanced quantum coherence times compared to NV centers in pristine diamond” Ghazisaeidi said.

This improvement arises from symmetry breaking near the dislocation, which creates specific states, called “clock transitions” that protect the qubit from environmental magnetic noise.

Beyond establishing stability and coherence, the work provided detailed predictions of optical and magnetic resonance signatures that can guide experimental identification of useful NV–dislocation configurations. 

“While not all defect arrangements are suitable for quantum operations, the results show that a substantial fraction meet the requirements for qubit functionality,” said co-author Yu Jin, who was a graduate student at UChicago at the time of the research and now is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Flatiron Institute in New York.

Altogether, the findings of the study introduce a new paradigm for quantum device design: using dislocations not as defects to eliminate, but as quantum highways that can host and facilitate chains of interacting qubits. The approach opens a path toward scalable quantum interconnects in diamond and potentially other materials, offering a promising strategy for future solid-state quantum technologies.

Citation: “Towards dislocation-driven quantum interconnects,” Zhang et al, npj Computational Materials, January 9, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41524-025-01945-3

Funding: This work was supported by the AFOSR Grant No. FA9550-23-1-0330.