IonQ debuts on the NYSE, 10/1/21.

On October 1, 2021, IonQ, a company founded on research based at the University of Maryland Department of Physics, joined the New York Stock Exchange. College Park Professor Chris Monroe is IonQ’s Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, and many Terp alumni hold positions in the company.

“It is exciting to see the fruits of the efforts at UMD Physics and the JQI lead to this significant step toward a quantum future,” said physics chair Steve Rolston. “Much of the underlying science and technology were developed here, and many of IonQ’s technical staff are former UMD graduate students and postdocs.”

Monroe joined UMD Physics in 2007, and he and his students, postdocs and colleagues registered a terrific run of achievements. They created the first quantum logic gate and demonstrated the first entanglement of multiple qubits. Monroe’s group also produced the first quantum entanglement between two widely separated atoms, and made headlines worldwide by reporting the first teleportation of quantum information between individual atoms a meter apart.

Not long after, Monroe’s Trapped Ion Quantum Information lab took the lead role in devising a comprehensive plan for a complete, modular, scalable, fault-tolerant quantum-computer architecture in which information would be stored in assemblies of elementary logic units consisting of registers of trapped, entangled ion qubits.    

These and other developments led to the creation of IonQ in 2015. The company headquarters is just off campus, near the College Park Metro Station.

UMD President Darryl Pines traveled to New York for the NYSE premiere. Pines touted the development in an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun: Quantum physics will revolutionize the DMV region.

For more on the NYSE opening: https://ionq.com/news/october-01-2021-ionq-listed-on-nyse