Harvard–Smithsonian's NASA Astrophysics Data System Indexes the Quantum Nexus Article by Mauritz Kop
By our Editor
Cambridge, MA, August 27, 2026 — The NASA Astrophysics Data System, the bibliographic index run by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian under a NASA grant, holds a permanent record for the book-length article The Nexus of Quantum Technology, Intellectual Property, and National Security: Deterrence by Denial for Democratic Resilience: An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons, written by Mauritz Kop (Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology). The article examines how democratic nations can protect critical quantum infrastructure through a middle path between total closure and open laissez-faire. The record carries the bibcode 2026arXiv260215051K and can be read at ui.adsabs.harvard.edu. It places an Article about export controls, patents and alliance policy inside the same catalogue that physicists and astronomers use to find the literature of their own field.
The NASA Astrophysics Data System record for the Nexus Article carries the bibcode 2026arXiv260215051K (editorial illustration).
What the NASA Astrophysics Data System is, who operates it, and what a bibcode does
The Astrophysics Data System is a literature database of more than twenty million records covering astronomy, astrophysics, physics and, increasingly, the science-policy work attached to them. It is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and funded by NASA. Its function is plain: one identifier per work, one canonical page per identifier, and a citation graph that connects them. Researchers reach it through their libraries, through ORCID, and through the reference managers that read its export formats.
The identifier is called a bibcode, a nineteen-character string that encodes year, publication and first author. For the Nexus Article the bibcode is 2026arXiv260215051K: the year 2026, the source arXiv, the eprint number 2602.15051 and the initial K for Kop. A bibcode does not expire when a journal changes publisher or a preprint server changes its URL scheme. That is why the record matters more than a link. It gives a legal Article the same durable handle that a paper in The Astrophysical Journal has carried since the 1970s.
What the ADS record for the Nexus Article contains, and how a reader can check it
The record reproduces the Article's full abstract, names Kop as sole author, dates the work to February 2026, and lists the DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2602.15051 alongside the identifier arXiv:2602.15051. It files the work under three subject keywords: Physics and Society, History and Philosophy of Physics, and Quantum Physics. The document type is recorded as an eprint, which is the accurate description — the Article was posted as a preprint on 11 February 2026, and this site has said from the start that readers should treat it as a working preprint rather than a peer-reviewed publication.
A reader who wants to confirm the link between the two identifiers can do it without an account. The system's own link gateway at ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/link_gateway/2026arXiv260215051K/EPRINT_HTML returns a redirect to arxiv.org/abs/2602.15051. The bibcode and the arXiv number resolve to the same document, which is the check that matters when a citation is copied by hand.
Which of Kop's works the Harvard–Smithsonian index now holds, from Nature Physics to the supply-chain paper
The Nexus Article arrives in an index that already held nine other works by the same author. The peer-reviewed entries are "A call for responsible quantum technology" in Nature Physics (Gasser, De Jong and Kop, 2024), "Quantum technology governance: A standards-first approach" in Science (Aboy, Gasser, Cohen and Kop, 2025), "Ten principles for responsible quantum innovation" in Quantum Science and Technology (2024), "Strategic governance of quantum supply chains: a criticality-based framework" in EPJ Quantum Technology (Cho, Kop and Lee, 2026), and "Ethics in the quantum age" in Physics World (Kop, 2021).
Alongside them sit the eprints: Towards Responsible Quantum Technology (2023), Towards an Atomic Agency for Quantum-AI (2025), Towards a European Quantum Act (2025), the Nexus Article (2026), and "Towards Geostrategic Critical Minerals and Materials Resilience" (Lee, Hurd, Van Wijk and Kop, 2026). Ten records, one author facet, one citation graph. A search on the author name in the index returns thirteen entries, a count that includes homonyms by other researchers named Kop; the ten listed here are his.
Why a physics index carrying a governance Article is the point, not a curiosity
Quantum governance scholarship has a placement problem. It is written by lawyers and policy scholars, it is read by physicists and engineers and procurement officers, and it is published in venues that neither group searches by default. A law review is invisible to a physics literature search. A physics preprint server is invisible to a legal database. The LSI test — least-trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, innovation-preserving — was designed to be applied by the people who write export-control lists and standards documents, and those people work from the physics side of the divide.
Indexing closes part of that gap. The Article's central claim is that the United States and its allies should pursue security-sufficient openness, operationalized through a test that disciplines both state and private action, with differentiated guardrails including red-zone domains where denial is the default. That argument now surfaces in the same search results as the technical literature on the sensing, cryptanalytic and computing capabilities it seeks to govern. A shorter version of the argument was published by Vanderbilt JETLaw in April 2026 under the title "Quantum Needs a Smarter Legal Control Plane".
What "Quantum Strategy Advisor to the Pentagon" means for the Stanford RQT paradigms
Since August 2026 Mauritz Kop has served as Quantum Strategy Advisor to the Pentagon, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, U.S. Department of Defense. He was invited to advise Pentagon and U.S. government officials on Quantum First, covering dual-use quantum technology, industrial policy, national and economic security, governance, and grand strategy. The role is an invited advisory one. It is not an employment relationship, and no institutional endorsement of this site or of any client work follows from it. The substance of the advice is not public.
What can be stated is which body of work travels with him. The Stanford RQT programme produced the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation, the Quantum-ELSPI research agenda, the migration discipline set out in "A Bletchley Park for the Quantum Age" in War on the Rocks on 6 November 2025, its sequel "Before Q-Day: The Race to Quantum First" with Joseph Federici on 20 July 2026, and the LSI test of the Nexus Article. Those are the paradigms the advisory work continues, and they are the reason a durable index entry is worth reporting: a policy adviser who is asked where a framework comes from can answer with an identifier rather than a link.
How to cite the Article: bibcode, DOI, and the arXiv identifier
The stable forms are these. Bibcode: 2026arXiv260215051K. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2602.15051. Preprint identifier: arXiv:2602.15051, posted 11 February 2026. Full title: The Nexus of Quantum Technology, Intellectual Property, and National Security: An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons. The author profile behind the record is set out on the Mauritz Kop scholar page, and the wider collection of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology is preserved in the Stanford Digital Repository.
Three indexes now carry the same Article: arXiv, which hosts the document; DataCite, through the DOI; and the NASA Astrophysics Data System, which supplies the citation graph. For a work whose subject is how democracies keep a shared research base open enough to be useful and closed enough to be safe, being findable by physicists is part of the argument.
Last updated: August 27, 2026.
Sources: NASA Astrophysics Data System record 2026arXiv260215051K (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, retrieved 27 August 2026); arXiv:2602.15051; DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2602.15051; ADS author search "Kop, M." (retrieved 27 August 2026).