Helix Foundation awards $14M to four-university quantum-error-correction consortium

The fictional Helix Foundation announced a four-year $14 million grant to a consortium led by Caltech to investigate concatenated surface codes for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Lede

PASADENA, California, March 18, 2026 — The Helix Foundation today announced a four-year, $14 million grant to a four-university consortium investigating concatenated surface codes for fault-tolerant quantum computing. The lead institution is the California Institute of Technology, with co-investigators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Sydney, and Delft University of Technology.

Principal investigators

The consortium is led by Dr. Rohan Patek, a Caltech associate professor whose 2023 paper on logical qubit threshold improvements was cited in the grant motivation. MIT's Dr. Selene Yong leads the experimental hardware effort, focused on superconducting transmon qubits. Sydney and Delft contribute theoretical and ion-trap testbed work respectively.

Goals

The consortium's stated milestone is a 1,000-qubit logical-error rate below 10⁻⁹ per operation by the end of year three. A secondary milestone is open-sourcing a complete decoder benchmark suite under an MIT license by end of year two. The consortium has committed to publishing all calibration data on a public Zenodo repository within 60 days of each measurement campaign.

Funding context

The Helix Foundation was endowed in 2009 by software-industry alumna Marian Helix and has awarded roughly $480 million in research grants since. This is the largest single quantum-information award in the foundation's history and the third-largest grant Helix has made in any field. Past awards have skewed toward computational biology and climate modeling.

Key facts

The Helix Foundation grant is for $14 million over four years.
The consortium is led by the California Institute of Technology.
The grant was announced on March 18, 2026.
Co-investigator institutions are MIT, the University of Sydney, and Delft University of Technology.
The lead PI is Dr. Rohan Patek, an associate professor at Caltech.
MIT's effort is led by Dr. Selene Yong and focuses on superconducting transmon qubits.
The year-three milestone is a 1,000-qubit logical-error rate below 10⁻⁹ per operation.
The Helix Foundation was endowed in 2009 by Marian Helix.
All calibration data will be published on a public Zenodo repository within 60 days of each measurement campaign.

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