IBM links two 120-qubit processors with meter-scale quantum interconnects

The paper is titled "Meter-scale quantum interconnects between large quantum processors." Semiconductor Engineering flagged it on 2 November. The abstract describes four L-couplers running between two 120-qubit IBM Nighthawk R1 chips. The paper is arXiv:2610.29986, credited to Neereja M. Sundaresan and co-authors, dated October 2026.

This is a wiring result, not a chemistry one. The brief here is battery chemistry research, so plainly: nothing in this article reports a new cathode, electrolyte or anode material. The freshest items that touch battery chemistry are regulatory and industrial, not laboratory.

What the battery sources actually say

The most concrete chemistry-adjacent item is the EU battery passport. Electrek reported on 2 November that from 18 February 2027, new e-bike batteries sold in the EU must carry a digital passport reachable by QR code. The requirement comes from the EU's 2023 Batteries Regulation. According to Electrek, the passport can hold manufacturer, chemistry, capacity, cycle count, carbon footprint and materials data, plus performance and degradation information. Access depends on authorization level, so consumers may not see a remaining-health percentage. Electrek notes there is no equivalent nationwide US requirement, but Trek and Specialized sell in Europe and will have to comply.

Recycling is the other half of the picture. CleanTechnica published a joint letter on 29 October from Transport & Environment, Recharge, Clean Tech for Europe and EIES ahead of the Circular Economy Act. The letter says over half of Europe's battery recycling capacity is at risk. It also states that at least 60% of Europe's black mass leaves the EU for final refining. Black mass is the mineral-rich concentrate from shredded lithium-ion cells. More likely leaves under other customs codes. The signatories want export measures assessed, a harmonised EU definition of black mass, strict end-of-waste criteria and a single Combined Nomenclature code.

Analysis shows at least 60% of Europe's black mass is leaving the EU, with this likely only the tip of the iceberg.

That is a feedstock problem, not a materials-science one, but it shapes which chemistries get recovered and at what cost.

Quantum computing, minus the hype

The quantum material leans heavily on error correction and algorithms rather than hardware chemistry. An arXiv paper submitted on 30 October by Jae-Hyun Baek, Byung-Sun Won and Jon-Lark Kim describes an LLM-guided, researcher-in-the-loop pipeline for discovering entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes. The authors report a family of codes, a Lean-checked algebraic certificate, 54 gaps closed in archived EAQECC tables and 115 verified code records. They also report ten nonexistence results with checked DRAT proofs. In a cohort of eight paired generation blocks, validation-selected iterative programs succeeded in 46.1% and 31.6% of held-out runs at lengths n=13 and 15, against 19.5% and 3.1% for independently generated programs.

HPCwire reported on 2 November on a Florida Atlantic University study led by Arslan Munir, published in Discover Quantum Science. The team used a public dataset of 309 lung cancer records, balanced to 540 synthetic samples, then narrowed inputs to 10 features. D-Wave annealing machines in a quantum support vector machine framework reached 94.31% accuracy in simulation and 91.90% on hardware. Munir is quoted saying the goal was to see how different quantum learning approaches perform when training data is deliberately constrained. The synthetic samples were not new patients, and the paper is a methods comparison, not a clinical claim.

For context on why interconnects matter at all, Semiconductor Engineering's 2 November roundup also lists cryo links for quantum chips and optical interconnects for AI clusters among the topics it is tracking. Microsoft's Research Focus podcast, edition 97, published 29 October, covers coding agents, AI use at work and extended-range weather forecasting, with no battery chemistry content.

Older material does not help either. Space.com's 30 October retrospective covers the first flight of NASA's Lunar Landing Research Vehicle on 30 October 1964, piloted by Joe Walker to about 10 feet. The Guardian's Apple Watch Ultra 4 review from 23 October reports 79 hours of general-use battery life and 10W charging. Neither is a chemistry result. The honest read is that the battery chemistry breakthrough story is not here yet.