Explore every episode of the podcast The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology
Dive into the complete episode list for The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.
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Title
Pub. Date
Duration
Atomic-Precision Silicon Qubits and the Path to Fault Tolerance with Michelle Simmons
26 Oct 2026
00:38:24
Michelle Simmons is the founder and CEO of Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) and a Scientia Professor at UNSW Sydney. She is one of the few people in the field who has simultaneously run a 200-person academic research centre, founded Australia's first vertically integrated quantum computing company, shaped how the community publishes its results (as inaugural editor-in-chief of npj Quantum Information), and influenced national quantum policy. That combination of roles gives her an unusually grounded view of what is actually hard — in the physics, in the manufacturing, and in the business.
The conversation is happening at a specific inflection point. SQC published two landmark Nature papers within ten weeks of each other in late 2025 and early 2026 — an 11-qubit silicon processor with two-qubit gate fidelities reaching 99.99%, and a 15,000-site analogue simulator demonstrating a metal-insulator transition. The company has advanced to Stage B of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program whose stated opening position is skepticism that fault-tolerant quantum computing is achievable by 2033. And SQC is now shipping an analog quantum AI chip to commercial customers. This episode is for anyone who wants to understand what silicon spin qubits actually are, why the donor-qubit approach is architecturally distinct from the CMOS-foundry approaches most competitors use, and what a credible long-range quantum roadmap looks like when it is grounded in manufacturing reality rather than theoretical aspiration.
What We Get Into
Why qubit quality improves with scale in SQC's system — the physical intuition behind using phosphorus donor atoms as "nature's perfect qubit," and why minimizing interfaces is the key insight that separates this approach from gate-defined quantum dots
The STM as a manufacturing tool, not just a microscope — how Simmons reframed the scanning tunneling microscope as the atomic-scale equivalent of an ASML stepper, and why 25 years of development now yields half a million registers in half a day at sub-nanometer precision
What the 15,000-site analogue simulator actually demonstrated — the distinction between analogue simulation and gate-model computation, what a metal-insulator transition tells you about correlated quantum matter, and why this device is also a tool for validating the gate-model processor as it scales
Six qubits per lead and all-to-all connectivity — how hyperfine frequency selection lets SQC address multiple nuclear spin qubits through a single electrical lead, and why that matters for error correction overhead
The eight-stage roadmap, set in 2014, and how it has held up — Simmons mapped her milestones onto the 1947–1981 arc of classical semiconductor development; two of the three near-term milestones came in ahead of schedule
DARPA QBI Stage B: what it validates and what it doesn't — why Simmons describes the program as "gold for a company" and how external scrutiny is forcing SQC to solve operating-environment questions earlier than planned
Quantum reservoir computing as a near-term product — how SQC's analog AI chip is already in customers' hands, cutting one communications company's training time from three weeks to two days, and why this is a bridge to the fault-tolerant era rather than a detour from it
Why you cannot outsource quantum manufacturing — Simmons's argument, drawn from decades of hands-on fabrication, that the teams who treated manufacturing as a commodity have paid a steep price
The hype question, answered by someone who has lived it — as a journal editor, APS division chair, and company CEO, Simmons has a rare vantage point on where the field's communication problems actually originate
What "fault tolerant" will need to mean in 2033 — and why the definition of that phrase is going to require as much parsing as the hardware milestone itself
Resources & Links
Guest & Company
Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) — SQC's official site; the news feed covers all major 2025–2026 milestones including the DARPA Stage B announcement and commercial partnerships
"Nature's perfect qubit." Simmons's phrase for the phosphorus donor atom in silicon: the qubit state forms naturally when the atom is placed, without complex materials engineering, in an environment where the silicon matrix acts as the vacuum does for trapped ions.
"Every atom counts." SQC's company motto, and a literal description of their manufacturing philosophy — because they know the position and behavior of every atom in every device, every chip is a learning opportunity.
> "I've never really seen...
Building a Regional Quantum Ecosystem with Corey Stambaugh
19 Oct 2026
00:30:18
Corey Stambaugh is one of the few people in the quantum world who has worked at the bench, inside federal policy, and now as the operational lead of a major public-private ecosystem initiative. He came up as a precision measurement physicist at NIST, moved to the White House's National Quantum Coordination Office as a senior policy advisor, and now directs the Capital of Quantum — Maryland's statewide effort to translate decades of university research into a commercial quantum industry cluster anchored in the Discovery District at the University of Maryland.
This conversation was recorded at the close of the 2026 Quantum World Congress, a week in which Maryland opened the Microsoft Quantum Research Center, announced Riverlane's U.S. headquarters in the Discovery District, welcomed QuEra Computing into the building, and unveiled a new partnership with Paladin Capital Group. If you follow quantum economic development, workforce policy, or the question of which regions are actually building durable quantum infrastructure versus generating press releases, this episode gives you a rare inside view from someone threading all of it together.
What We Get Into
How the Capital of Quantum actually came together — the decades of university research that preceded the January 2025 launch, and what it took to stand up a formal initiative on top of that foundation
What "150,000 square feet and a fridge at 14 millikelvin" means in practice — the Discovery Center build-out, from Microsoft buying the building to pumping down their dilution refrigerator in under a year
Why the tenant list spans almost every major hardware modality — IQM (superconducting), Quantum Motion (silicon CMOS), Microsoft (topological), IonQ (trapped ion), QuEra (neutral atom), and Riverlane (error correction software) are all in or adjacent to the same building, and whether that's strategy or circumstance
The DARPA Capital Quantum Benchmarking Hub — Maryland is one of three states with a memorandum of agreement under DARPA's QBI program, and what that independent benchmarking infrastructure means for an ecosystem that also hosts the companies being evaluated
Quantum sensing as the near-term economic story — why Stambaugh, a metrologist by training, sees sensing startups like Euclid (NV diamond magnetometers for semiconductor inspection) as having clearer market paths than computing or networking right now
The Paladin Capital partnership and the DC venture gap — why the mid-Atlantic VC culture differs from the West Coast model and what the initiative is doing to change the capital formation picture
Workforce development from Q12 to the makerspace — a classroom next to a working dilution refrigerator, high school students from across the street getting their first look at a cryostat, and the lineage from early NSF quantum education workshops to the UN International Year of Quantum
How Stambaugh thinks about competing ecosystems — Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico — and why he frames them as complementary rather than adversarial, while still being clear about Maryland's competitive positioning
"Tell me where a national lab is, I'll tell you where a physicist is, and I'll tell you where quantum is." — Stambaugh on why quantum clusters form where they do, and why the lineage from NIST, Sandia, and Argonne to today's startups is not accidental.
"We ...
Quantum Workforce, Sensing, and the Long Game of Operationalization with Isabella Martinez
12 Oct 2026
00:37:39
Isabella Martinez sits at an unusual intersection in the quantum ecosystem: she's not primarily a hardware researcher or an algorithm theorist, but a practitioner who has to make quantum work in operational environments — for customers who have real missions, real constraints, and very little patience for technology that can't be deployed. Her team at Booz Allen spans quantum computing, quantum sensing, and post-quantum cryptography, which means she's watching all three of the field's major near-term vectors simultaneously.
This conversation was recorded at Quantum World Congress 2026, and it reflects the mood of that moment: sensing is on the cusp of real deployment, PQC migration is being driven by policy urgency, and quantum computing is still asking the question of when — but the "when" is getting more specific. If you work in quantum and care about how the technology actually crosses the gap from lab to mission, this episode is for you. It's also a genuinely useful listen for anyone thinking about quantum careers, workforce development, or how to build teams that can navigate a technology that doesn't yet have a playbook.
What We Get Into
Why Isabella's biomedical engineering capstone — not a physics class — shaped her entire approach to quantum: The lesson wasn't about building a better device; it was about why a life-saving tool sat unused because no one had time to get trained on it.
The four-stage commercialization arc she uses to frame quantum maturity: Solve for physics, then engineering, then business case, then operationalization — and why that last step is the one the field talks about least.
What quantum sensing deployment actually looks like right now: Including a vivid example of a quantum PNT sensor that "can't get wet" and what happens when you try to put it in a waterproof box without destroying its precision advantage.
Why quantum sensing and quantum computing will diverge in their adoption paths: A drone operator doesn't need to know their navigation data is quantum-derived. A quantum computing user, at least for now, probably does — and that changes everything about how you design for adoption.
How Booz Allen's team discovered the wrong part of a drug discovery workflow was being targeted for quantum speedup: A computational biologist and chemist sat down with the physics team and revealed that the step everyone assumed was the bottleneck wasn't the bottleneck at all.
Why Isabella actively recruits people with criminology degrees, economics backgrounds, and education startup experience onto a quantum team: And why she's more worried about the rise of pure quantum-only graduate programs than she is about the talent shortage.
The AI parallel that's shaping how enterprise customers think about quantum timing: Customers who watched AI capabilities leap unexpectedly are now asking "when" instead of "what" — but they're also more willing to wait for the right moment rather than jump in early.
Her honest read on NISQ-era value: Real scientific output is happening on today's devices, but the early 2030s are where she expects the first commercially meaningful fault-tolerant results to appear.
What the quantum community risks losing as the field matures: The collaborative, cross-disciplinary spirit that has defined the early era — and why she thinks that spirit is actually a competitive asset worth protecting.
> "The problem wasn't actually an engineering problem. An engineering tool existed for the problem they were having us solve. The problem was that getting certified to use that tool took so long that most nurses didn't have the time to get trained on it."
— Isabella on the capstone project that shaped her entire career philosophy: adoption is often a harder problem than invention.
> "First you have to solve for physics, then you have to solve for engineering, and then you have to solve for business case. But I would argue then you have to solve for operationalizing something — which is even beyond them."
— On the four-stage arc that the quantum field's commercialization narrative tends to stop one step too early.
Insight: When Booz Allen sat a computational biologist and chemist down with their quantum algorithm team to walk through an actual drug discovery workflow, the team discovered that the step they'd assumed was the computational bottleneck wasn't the bottleneck at all. The right use case only became visible when the domain experts were in the room.
> "I need to do this purposefully. I have to purposefully open reqs where we are looking for people with more than just a physics degree."
— On why interdisciplinary hiring is a deliberate strategy, not a nice-to-have.
Insight: Isabella draws a direct parallel between the rise ...
Superconducting Qubits, STAR Architecture, and Diamond-Spin Qubits with Dr. Shintaro Sato
05 Oct 2026
00:41:20
Dr. Shintaro Sato is a Fellow and Head of the Quantum Laboratory at Fujitsu Research, and Deputy Director of the RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Centre. He oversees Fujitsu's entire quantum effort — from device fabrication through error correction architecture, software, and application research — and has been building toward commercial quantum systems since Fujitsu began its serious quantum R&D push around 2020. With over 164 publications spanning graphene nanoelectronics, superconducting qubit design, and fault-tolerant architectures, he brings both deep technical credibility and a rare full-stack perspective.
This conversation is timely because two significant developments converged almost simultaneously just before recording: Fujitsu announced a tin-vacancy (SnV) diamond-spin prototype developed with TU Delft and QuTech, and began testing its STAR error-correction architecture on neutral-atom hardware with startup Yaqumo — an explicit signal that Fujitsu is betting on hardware-agnostic software layers even as it races to scale its own superconducting devices. Listeners who follow quantum hardware roadmaps, fault-tolerant computing, or Japan's national quantum strategy will find this episode unusually specific and candid.
What We Get Into
How Fujitsu actually fabricates its superconducting chips — Sato explains how the team adapted Nakamura-sensei's original RIKEN designs, developed their own Josephson junction uniformity techniques, and built a research fab capability from scratch rather than licensing finished devices.
Why packaging is the hardest problem at 1,000+ qubits — not the qubits themselves, but the superconducting wiring, chip-to-chip interconnects, interposers, and the sheer number of control lines running from room temperature to millikelvin. Sato is candid that his engineers "don't want to do it anymore."
What STAR architecture actually does — it's not a new error-correction code; it operates at the logical gate layer above the surface code, replacing the notoriously expensive T gate with phase-rotation gates and selectively reintroducing T gates only when rotation angles would otherwise accumulate too much error. Version 3 achieves roughly a 10x accuracy improvement over version 2 for the same physical qubit count.
Why STAR is hardware-agnostic — because it operates at the logical operation layer rather than the physical error-correction layer, it can in principle run on any hardware modality. Fujitsu has now begun testing it on Yaqumo's neutral-atom platform, and Sato mentions QuEra has also demonstrated STAR independently.
What tin-vacancy (SnV) diamond-spin qubits are actually for — not a replacement for superconducting qubits, but a photonic interconnect technology. SnV centers emit photons that can carry quantum information between modules, potentially linking separate dilution refrigerators — a transduction approach that sidesteps one of the hardest problems in scaling superconducting systems.
The speed mismatch problem in hybrid architectures — superconducting qubits operate at gigahertz speeds; nuclear spins in diamond-spin systems operate at kilohertz. Sato acknowledges this directly and frames it as an architectural challenge analogous to CPU-memory hierarchies in classical computing.
What Fujitsu's open-source strategy looks like in practice — the collaboration with Osaka University on Project Octopus, which produced an open-source full-stack control and software platform, is now being adopted as part of Fujitsu's commercial offering.
What 2030 actually looks like — Sato is measured: a 10,000-qubit machine will still be a "very small scale logical quantum computer," most useful for quantum chemistry in hybrid HPC+quantum workflows. Revolutionary applications will come incrementally, not all at once.
The long-term vision — Sato's stated dream is a quantum computer small enough to fit in a smartphone, which he acknowledges requires entirely different physics than anything on today's roadmap.
Shintaro Sato — ResearchGate Profile — Full publication list (164 papers, 3,096 citations); useful for tracing his path from graphene nanoelectronics to quantum architecture.
Interview with Shintaro Sato — QuTech — Sato discusses the NV-center and diamond-spin collaboration with QuTech and the vision for quantum-as-a-service.
STAR Architecture Overview — Fujitsu Global — Technical explainer for STAR ver. 3 (announced March 2026), including the qubit-reduction claims for ruthenium-catalyst calculations.
Quantum Venture Investing from the Lab to the Market with Marie Lepske
28 Sep 2026
00:41:02
Marie Lepske brings a combination that's genuinely rare in venture: a background in applied mathematics and physics, early experience covering quantum at Runa Capital before most generalist funds knew the field existed, and now a GP seat at Constructor Capital, which closed a $110M Fund I in February 2026 with more than half its capital directed toward next-generation computing including quantum. She backed Qnami at Runa — a quantum sensing company acquired by Quantum Design in June 2026, one of the few clean sensing exits the field has produced — and Constructor's portfolio includes QuEra, which raised over $230M in a round led by Google Quantum AI and SoftBank.
The conversation matters now because the quantum investment landscape is genuinely changing. SPAC activity, mega-rounds from hyperscalers, and rising valuations are pulling in non-specialist capital at the same time that the science is getting harder to evaluate from the outside. Lepske is one of the people who has to navigate that tension every day, and she's willing to name the failure modes.
Founders building quantum or deep-tech companies, investors trying to understand where specialist and generalist capital intersect, and technically curious listeners who want to understand how the business side of quantum actually works will all find this episode useful.
What We Get Into
Why technical training matters at the earliest stages — and what it actually buys you when a founding team's only asset is a laboratory and an optical table, before there's even a legal entity
How the specialist-versus-generalist divide is evolving — Lepske's 2022 argument that early-stage quantum would stay specialist territory, and how she reads the arrival of Google, SoftBank, and NVIDIA in QuEra's cap table
The due diligence framework for pre-product science startups — team provenance, patent landscape, IP legal review, and how Constructor uses its scientific advisory board to validate founders they can't fully assess internally
What a "no" looks like — the specific signals that make Constructor wait rather than invest, including teams with strong science but no credible path to market and IP positions that are already crowded
The Qnami exit and what it reveals about quantum sensing — why sensing applications are currently concentrated in R&D markets, which verticals Lepske thinks will break out first, and why sensing competes with computing for buyer attention
The SPAC problem — why the wave of quantum public listings concerns her, and why evaluating roadmap credibility requires the kind of deep familiarity that takes years to build
How Constructor supports portfolio companies beyond capital — executive hiring, software development guidance, co-investor introductions, and the limits of that hands-on model
AI and quantum as parallel tracks — why she doesn't see AI as cannibalizing quantum talent or capital, and where she thinks the two fields will eventually converge
Resources & Links
Guest & Fund
Marie Lepske — LinkedIn — Primary professional profile; includes keynote highlights and 2026 speaking engagements
Constructor Capital — Official Website — Fund homepage with portfolio listings, team bios, and investment thesis across DeepTech, Software Tech, and Knowledge Tech
On what early-stage diligence actually looks like: > "They have only laboratory, and they have optical table which they want to show to you and you should understand if they have some interesting and useful patents or they can file them during the next one to two years."
On where specialist and generalist capital divide: > "These bigger players, they're coming later. They're coming when we already investigated that this particular technology and this particular team actually could win."
On the SPAC problem: > "It's very difficult for [non-specialist investors] to evaluate if they're doing proper investment or not, or if this valuation is good or not… You should be able to find out these roadmaps and to understand if this is a real roadmap or just written for the SPAC."
Insight — sensing vs. computing for buyer attention: Lepske observes that quantum sensing is structurally underappreciated relative to computing, not because the products aren't real, but because governments and corporates perceive computing as the larger prize — which she suggests is not obviously correct.
Insight — quantum talent scarcity as a leading indicator: She notes that quantum computing companies are now competing for talent the way AI companies did four or five years ago, with roughly 400–450 relevant laboratories globally — a number that puts the field's scale in sharp relief.
Related Episodes
Ep. 22 — Trapped Ions and Quantum VCs with Chiara Decaroli — Another physicist-turned-investor conversation; useful companion for understanding how scientific training shapes investment judgment in quantum hardware
Ep. 96 —
Rational Quantum Mechanics and the Qubit Ceiling with Tim Palmer
21 Sep 2026
00:46:32
Tim Palmer is not a quantum computing skeptic from the outside. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a CBE, an IPCC lead author, and the inventor of probabilistic ensemble forecasting — techniques now used in every major weather prediction center on Earth. He did his PhD in general relativity under Roger Penrose. When someone with that profile publishes a peer-reviewed paper in PNAS arguing that the entire fault-tolerant quantum computing roadmap may rest on a mathematical assumption that is subtly and profoundly wrong, it is worth paying close attention.
The timing matters. The quantum computing industry is spending billions on the assumption that standard quantum mechanics scales indefinitely — that if you can build enough error-corrected qubits, Shor's algorithm will eventually factor RSA-2048. Palmer's RaQM framework, reviewed by leading quantum foundations researchers including Lucien Hardy and Nicolas Gisin, makes a concrete, falsifiable prediction that this assumption will fail somewhere between 200 and 1,000 error-corrected qubits. That falsification window is opening right now. This episode is for anyone who cares about the foundations of quantum mechanics, the long-term viability of fault-tolerant quantum computing, or the rare pleasure of watching a serious scientist put a real stake in the ground.
What We Get Into
Why Palmer left general relativity and came back to quantum foundations decades later — the conceptual thread connecting chaos theory, climate forecasting, and the geometry of quantum state space
What Rational Quantum Mechanics actually proposes — specifically, why Palmer argues that Hilbert space should be defined over rational numbers rather than the full continuum of complex numbers, and what that means physically
The information-theoretic argument for a qubit ceiling — why, in RaQM, the information content of n entangled qubits grows linearly with n rather than exponentially, and why that creates a hard conflict with the quantum Fourier transform above a few hundred qubits
Why the 2022 Nobel Prize did not prove non-locality — Palmer's careful distinction between "Bell's inequality is violated" (experimentally established) and "the world is non-local" (an interpretation), and why that distinction matters enormously
How gravity enters the picture — Palmer's argument, drawing on Penrose-style thinking, that gravity is the physical mechanism responsible for discretizing Hilbert space, and how that determines the numerical qubit ceiling
Why the ceiling is technology-dependent but bounded absolutely — how Palmer estimates ~400 qubits for current photonic technology and argues that no technology, however exotic, can push the limit above ~1,000
What happens to Shor's algorithm specifically — why the quantum Fourier transform is the precise point of failure, and what that means for RSA encryption and the post-quantum cryptography transition
The optimistic read on a potentially negative result — Palmer's argument that a fundamental discovery about quantum mechanics, even one that limits quantum computing, could open doors we cannot yet imagine, in the same way general relativity eventually gave us GPS
214 is a delightful bonus to the conversation, a short story by Noel Gorelick that imagines what might happen if RaQM turns out to be true.
Key Quotes & Insights
> "It's not that nature ...
Classical Reversible Computing on Quantum Dots with Daniel Loss
14 Sep 2026
00:49:01
Daniel Loss is RDIA Chair Professor of Quantum Computing and Director of the Quantum Center at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia, where this work was done. He is also one of the most influential theorists in quantum computing. The 1997 Loss-DiVincenzo proposal — that electron spins in quantum dots could serve as qubits — now has more than 9,000 citations and is the conceptual foundation for the semiconductor spin-qubit platforms that Intel, HRL, Diraq, and a wave of European startups are actively building toward. In 2025, Loss was named a Clarivate Citation Laureate in Physics, a designation with a strong historical track record as a Nobel Prize predictor.
The reason to listen now is that Loss has turned his attention to a question that predates quantum computing itself: can reversible, energy-efficient classical logic be physically realized? His 2026 paper argues that the spin-qubit hardware the field has spent decades developing is, almost incidentally, the ideal platform to do exactly that — and that the energy advantage over room-temperature CMOS could be so large it would matter enormously for AI inference workloads and data-center power budgets. This episode is for anyone following the spin-qubit roadmap, the energy crisis in classical computing, or the deeper question of what semiconductor quantum hardware is ultimately good for.
What We Get Into
Why reversible computing is having a moment now: The ideas of Landauer, Bennett, Fredkin, and Toffoli have been around since the early 1980s — Loss explains what changed experimentally that makes the proposal feel like engineering rather than philosophy.
The core energy claim, unpacked: Loss walks through why a spin-qubit Toffoli gate operating near 4 Kelvin could cost roughly 10⁵ times less energy than its CMOS equivalent, even after accounting for refrigeration overhead — and where the accounting is still incomplete.
What makes the computation classical and the hardware quantum: The gate uses coherent quantum dynamics internally, but inputs and outputs are classical spin states. No superposition is required between gate operations, which dramatically relaxes the error-correction burden.
The iToffoli gate and why it works for classical logic: Loss describes how a target spin hopping between quantum dots, controlled by two neighboring spins, implements a universal reversible gate using only DC voltage pulses — no radio-frequency drives required.
The Quantum Zeno trick for classical memory: Frequent projective measurement of a spin state can stabilize it against relaxation, turning one of quantum computing's central headaches into a feature for classical storage.
Why AI inference is the natural first application: Error tolerance, parallelizability, and the absence of a need for new algorithms make AI inference workloads a compelling early target — and Loss argues this de-risks the spin-qubit enterprise regardless of whether fault-tolerant quantum computing arrives on schedule.
The dual-use platform argument: The same germanium/silicon quantum-dot array could, in principle, run quantum algorithms when superposition is useful and classical reversible logic when it is not — a flexibility that changes the economic calculus for building the hardware.
What the experimental community needs to do next: Loss describes the first falsifiable tests — a three-spin iToffoli truth table, energy budget measurements, and a five-dot reversible adder — and names the groups best positioned to run them.
How the brain comparison reframes the stakes: Loss notes that his energy estimates put spin-qubit classical computing roughly four orders of magnitude below the energy cost of a biological synapse, which has implications for how we think about the physical limits of AI.
Daniel Loss — Wikipedia — Comprehensive biographical overview, career history, and awards list for listeners who want background before or after listening.
> "If the physical platform is successful, we are guaranteed to have killer applications — because I don't need to find new algorithms for this." > — Loss on why classical reversible computing de-risks the spin-qubit investment, regardless of the timeline for fault-tolerant quantum algorithms.
> "The energy difference is a factor of ten to the fifth. And this is mind-blowing." > — Loss summarizing the device-level energy advantage of a spin-qubit Toffoli gate over its CMOS equivalent, after accounting for refrigeration overhead.
Insight: Loss argues that the Quantum Zeno effect — the tendency of frequent measurement to freeze a quantum state — can be used deliberately to stabilize classical spin states against relaxation, turning a well-known quantum-computing obstacle into a memory-stabilization tool for classical logic.
Insight: The proposal requires superposition only inside a gate operation, not between operations. This means the error-correction burden is classical (majority voting) rather than quantum (surface codes or similar), which is a qualit...
Quantum-Inspired AI and Tensor Network Compression with Román Orús
07 Sep 2026
00:40:57
Román Orús is one of the rare physicists who built a foundational mathematical tool — tensor networks — and then watched it become the engine of a unicorn. His 2013 introduction to tensor networks has been cited over 2,000 times; his company, Multiverse Computing, just announced a $570 million Series C at a $1.7 billion pre-money valuation. That arc — from condensed matter theory to Europe's largest quantum software company — is worth understanding on its own terms. But what makes this conversation particularly timely is a May 2026 paper Orús co-authored demonstrating that individual layers of Meta's Llama 3.1 8B language model can be encoded as quantum circuits and executed on IBM's 156-qubit Quantum System Two while the model generates text. It's a proof of concept, not a product — but it's a real result, and Orús is honest about what it does and doesn't prove.
This episode is for listeners who want a technically grounded, hype-free account of the quantum-AI intersection: what tensor networks actually are, why they keep getting rediscovered across different fields, where classical simulation of quantum systems genuinely competes with quantum hardware, and what it looks like to build a company at the boundary between those two worlds.
Sponsor Message
The Capital of Quantum is a people story. Built on a top-five quantum PhD program and 35-plus years of quantum research leadership. It's the billion-dollar initiative behind Discovery Center, launching this month with Microsoft, IQM, and Quantum Motion inside. That's why IonQ was born and is headquartered here, and why global companies keep choosing a spot minutes from Washington, D.C. This is where quantum is transforming the world. Come see it at the Quantum World Congress, September 23rd through 25th, College Park, Maryland. CapitalOfQuantum.com.
What We Get Into
What tensor networks actually are — Orús explains the core idea without equations: tensors as the "DNA" of a quantum state, and how a network of them lets you see and quantify the internal correlations (entanglement) that matter versus the ones you can safely ignore.
Why the same math keeps appearing in different fields — from condensed matter simulation to quantum computing simulation to machine learning, and why Orús sees that recurrence as a sign of something deep rather than a coincidence.
How ChatGPT changed Multiverse's trajectory — the company was already applying tensor networks to machine learning before 2022; the emergence of large language models gave them a problem where the fit was obvious and the market was enormous.
What "90–95% compression with minimal accuracy loss" actually means — Orús explains the overparameterization problem in current AI models and why he believes tensor networks address a genuine structural inefficiency, not just a tuning opportunity.
The IBM kicked Ising model episode — Orús describes how his team rapidly produced a classical tensor network simulation of an experiment IBM had presented as evidence of quantum utility, and what that kind of competition between classical and quantum methods actually does for the field.
The Cayley Unitary Adapter experiment — how Multiverse sliced individual layers out of Llama 3.1 8B, encoded them as quantum circuits, ran them on a 156-qubit IBM processor, and achieved a 1.4% perplexity improvement — and why Orús argues the improvement-per-parameter ratio is the number that matters, not the headline percentage.
Why edge deployment is the real commercial driver — drones, satellites, vehicles, and industrial devices that cannot rely on cloud connectivity are the market pulling Multiverse toward smaller, more efficient models, not just benchmark competition with frontier labs.
How Orús thinks about Multiverse's identity — he calls it a "quantum AI company," not a quantum company or an AI company, and explains what that distinction means for how they allocate research effort and where they expect to be when fault-tolerant quantum hardware matures.
What he'd tell a PhD student today — a genuinely honest answer about the trade-offs between academic research and deep-tech industry, from someone who has lived both simultaneously.
Resources & Links
Guest & Company
Román Orús — Personal Site — Lists talks, reviews, affiliations, and awards including the 2024 Physics, Innovation and Technology Prize from the Royal Spanish Society of Physics.
> "We are using atomic bombs to kill a mosquito." Orús on the overparameterization of current large language models — and why he believes the transformer-attention paradigm, however successful, ...
Quantum Workforce Intelligence from qubitsok.com with Piotr Lewandowski
31 Aug 2026
00:46:17
Piotr Lewandowski is a software engineer based in Poland who, as a side project, has built something that no well-funded research institute has: a continuously updated, ontology-tagged intelligence platform that ingests the entire quant-ph archive, tracks thousands of open quantum roles across hundreds of companies, parses patents and grants and open-source repositories, and links all of it to individual researcher profiles. He is not a tenured academic or a hardware engineer. He is an independent data practitioner, and that outsider position gives him a vantage point on the quantum workforce that insiders rarely have — or rarely share.
This conversation matters now because the quantum industry is simultaneously claiming a generational workforce opportunity and struggling to fill highly specialized roles. Lewandowski's data offers a rare ground-truth check on both claims. If you work in quantum hiring, research, policy, or investment — or if you're a student trying to understand what the field actually looks like from the outside — this episode will give you a more honest picture than almost anything else currently available.
What We Get Into
How qubitsok's 500-tag ontology was built from scratch — why Lewandowski chose a tree-structured, parent-child tag system rather than relying on existing academic metadata infrastructure, and how it steers AI toward the most specific and useful classification rather than broad category labels.
What the full quant-ph corpus reveals about researcher mobility — which countries are gaining quantum talent (Germany and China are notable winners) and which are losing it (the US and Australia are among the top brain-drain sources), based on tracking affiliation changes over time in published papers.
The rising share of industry authorship in quantum research — industry-affiliated authors have grown from roughly 3.4% of quant-ph papers in 2005 to nearly 14% in 2026, and what that structural shift might mean for what gets published — and what doesn't.
Why the platform tracks open-source contributions alongside papers — when researchers join industry and their publication rate drops, their open-source activity becomes a meaningful proxy for continued technical engagement, and qubitsok indexes both.
The "qubie" talent-matching tool Lewandowski is building — rather than keyword overlap, qubie dispatches sub-agents to extract specific, claim-level evidence from a researcher's papers, dissertations, and other public writing, then returns a structured profile and interview guide for each candidate.
Why sourcing quantum talent is a fundamentally different problem than general tech recruiting — the evidence of what a quantum researcher can actually do is largely public and published, but no one has had the infrastructure to read it systematically at scale until now.
The two product directions Lewandowski is weighing — analytics and competitive intelligence for investors and companies versus talent matching for quantum hiring — and why he's currently prioritizing the latter.
What it means to build a field-level intelligence platform as an outsider — Lewandowski is neither employed by a quantum company nor affiliated with a university, and that independence shapes both what he can see and what he can say.
Resources & Links
Guest Links
qubitsok.com — The platform itself: quantum job board, daily arXiv paper digest with semantic tagging, and researcher collaboration search. All free for researchers and job seekers.
qubitsok.com/collaborate — Search for quantum researchers by expertise, ontology tag, and affiliation — useful for finding collaborators or co-authors.
Piotr Lewandowski on LinkedIn — The best place to reach him directly, especially if you're a company interested in early access to the qubie talent-matching product.
2026 Quantum Computing Salary Report — Analysis of 194 salary data points drawn from real job postings; a useful benchmark for researchers and hiring managers alike.
Fastest-Growing Quantum Skills 2026 — Lewandowski's analysis of 1,212 quantum jobs and 14,975 papers identifying which technical skills are accelerating and which are declining in the labor market.
Tools & Platforms
qubitsok.com/jobs — Live quantum job listings, filtered by the platform's 500-tag ontology.
qubitsok.com/region/europe — Live European quantum jobs market data, useful context for the EU talent and salary discussion.
qubitsok.com/hire — Information for companies looking to use qubitsok's candidate database and, soon, the qubie matching tool.
On why the published record is a better hiring signal than a LinkedIn profile: > "Research gives you this unique lens to see people's work before you talk to them. You can be really prepared, and this helps on two sides — you talk to people actually capable of filling the role, and you're not wasting their time asking questions they already answered via their published work."
On what brain-drain data actually shows: > "The biggest country that gained quantum computing talent in the last twenty-four months is Germany — which is not something someone could expect. And the biggest countries getting brain-drained are, interestingly, the United States."
Insight — on the soul-crushing reality of quantum sourcing: Lewandowski's first job in college was sourcing — going through profiles with pen and paper, making cold calls that nobody wanted to receive. His argument is that quantum hiring doesn't have to work that way, because the evidence of what a researcher can do is already public. The problem has never been a lack of signal; it's been a lack of infrastructure to read it.
On the rising share of industry authorship: Industry-affiliated authors have grown from roughly 3.4% of quant-ph papers in 2005 to nearly 14% in 2026 — a structural shift in who is producing the science, with implications for what gets published and what gets quietly redirected into proprietary pipelines.
Insight — on the limits of the data: Lewandowski is consistently careful about w...
Quantum Risk, Readiness, and the Enterprise Boardroom with Richard Entrup
24 Aug 2026
00:35:32
Richard Entrup is unusual in quantum circles: he's not a physicist, and he doesn't pretend to be. He spent decades as a CIO, CTO, CDO, and CISO at organizations including Verizon, Christie's, Tiffany & Company, MoMA, Disney/ABC, and Time Warner before joining KPMG to lead its Emerging Solutions practice. That background — deep operational experience on the client side — shapes everything about how he thinks about quantum. He's not selling a hardware roadmap; he's thinking about what it actually takes to get a large, complex organization to change its cryptographic infrastructure before a threat materializes.
The conversation matters now because the signals are accelerating. NIST has finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards, executive orders in the US are pushing federal agencies toward PQC migration, and the algorithmic efficiency gains that reduce the qubit threshold for breaking RSA-2048 keep coming. Listeners who work in enterprise technology, cybersecurity, or quantum strategy — or who advise organizations that do — will find Entrup's practitioner perspective a useful counterweight to the more hardware-focused conversations that dominate the field.
What We Get Into
Why Q-Day's exact date is the wrong question — and why the more important issue is how long it will take enterprises to even inventory their cryptographic exposure, let alone remediate it
The scale of the cryptographic migration problem, including why a single laptop may contain hundreds of individual cryptographic components and why upstream/downstream API dependencies make this a supply-chain-wide challenge, not just an internal IT project
Why "harvest now, decrypt later" creates urgency today, regardless of when fault-tolerant quantum computers arrive — and how compliance and regulatory timelines interact with that threat model
What crypto agility actually means in practice — moving from a "set it and forget it" cryptographic posture to a dynamic, continuously monitored framework, including the pressure SSL certificate renewal windows are already creating
How KPMG built its PQC practice, incubated it within the firm, and handed it off to the cybersecurity advisory team as a core service offering
The "good quantum" side of the ledger — how KPMG's emerging research function is approaching quantum computing as a source of competitive advantage, not just risk, and what sectors are furthest along in exploring it
The AI-quantum convergence, including Entrup's observation that AI is already being used to read and crack code — and what that means for the urgency of cryptographic modernization
Why the enterprise quantum opportunity still has a long tail, and how the current moment compares to the early infrastructure phase of the internet — when everyone was talking about TCP/IP and DNS, not Uber or Netflix
KPMG Quantum Dawn (2025) — KPMG's enterprise quantum readiness hub, introducing the Q-PREP framework and PQC implementation services, with Entrup as named lead
> "It's not if but when. And it could be five years, could be three years, could be ten years. The fact is organizations are not gonna be ready. And that's the scary part." — Richard Entrup on Q-Day
> "This is not just the CISO. This is gonna be the software engineering app dev guys. This is gonna be all your partners, upstream and downstream, who have to also be compliant — because if you change your crypto and they don't, that stuff's gonna break." — On why PQC migration is an enterprise-wide, supply-chain-wide problem
Insight: Entrup draws a sharp distinction between the "bad quantum" (cryptographic risk requiring urgent defensive action) and the "good quantum" (competitive opportunity with a longer tail) — and argues that most organizations aren't adequately addressing either.
Insight: The analogy to the early internet is deliberate: just as the 1990s were consumed with TCP/IP and DNS rather than the applications those protocols would eventually enable, the current quantum moment is still largely an infrastructure conversation — and that's normal, not a sign of failure.
> "AI is expediting all of this. If AI is doing one thing, the use case is reading code and cracking it. That's pretty scary." — On the intersection of AI capability and cryptographic vulnerability
Related Episodes
Ep. 81 — Quantum LDPC Error Correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster — Directly relevant: Cohen and Webster discuss how QLDPC error correction reduces the qubit overhead needed for RSA cryptanalysis, the technical underpinning of the threat timeline Entrup describes
Ep. 38 —
Silicon Spin Qubits and the IBM–HRL Acquisition with Thaddeus D. Ladd
17 Aug 2026
00:44:21
Thaddeus Ladd has spent seventeen years at HRL as the theoretical anchor of its silicon spin qubit program — co-authoring the 2023 Nature paper that demonstrated universal logic with encoded spin qubits, and contributing to the 2026 QPU paper that integrated qubits, a cryo-CMOS controller, and a new superconducting ribbon cable into a single digitally controlled system. He is not a commentator on this acquisition; he is one of the people whose work made it happen.
The conversation is recorded eleven days after IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire HRL from Boeing and General Motors — a deal that has not yet closed. That timing makes this one of the few technically grounded, insider-adjacent conversations available about what IBM is actually buying, why the exchange-only spin qubit architecture is strategically distinctive, and what the combination of HRL's research culture with IBM's fabrication ambitions could produce. Listeners who follow quantum hardware, quantum computing strategy, or the evolution of industrial research labs will find this episode unusually substantive.
What We Get Into
Why the 2026 QPU paper is a systems story, not just a fidelity story — the qubit chip, the cryo-CMOS controller operating at four Kelvin, and the new superconducting ribbon cable are all part of one integrated QPU, and that framing is central to understanding what IBM acquired.
What "exchange-only" actually means — why using only voltage-controlled exchange interactions (no microwaves, no local oscillators, no phase tracking during idle) is both a technical constraint and a significant engineering advantage for scaling.
Why the jump from six dots to fifty-four dots happened so fast — and what was happening in HRL's fabrication program that wasn't being published.
What EUV lithography has to do with spin qubit scaling — and why the connection between HRL's process and IBM's Anderon 300 mm quantum foundry is one of the clearest pieces of strategic logic in the acquisition announcement.
How HRL's cryo-CMOS work could benefit IBM's superconducting program — and why the control-and-interconnect bottleneck is a shared problem across modalities, not a spin-qubit-specific one.
The "chandelier" reframe — Thaddeus's argument that the cables, filters, and control electronics surrounding a superconducting qubit chip are not overhead; they are part of the QPU, and understanding that changes how you read the HRL acquisition.
Which modality Thaddeus thinks will reach commercially useful scale first — and why he still believes spin qubits are the long-term answer, using an analogy to vacuum tubes and silicon microprocessors that is worth hearing in full.
What the acquisition means for HRL as an institution — the context of lost program funding, the December 2025 Q2B meeting, and what it means for a defense-oriented industrial research lab to find a commercial path through IBM.
HRL Quantum — Collection of HRL quantum research, talks, and news.
Organizations
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Quantum in the Big Four with Aaron Kemp
10 Aug 2026
00:44:25
Aaron Kemp sits at an unusual intersection. He holds a doctorate in cybersecurity, spent years in DoD classified environments running SCI and SAP facilities, and now leads KPMG's quantum research practice — where he's a co-author on a recent hybrid QML paper with Kipu Quantum and IBM. He's also the lead author of KPMG's Q-PREP framework, which pushes enterprises to treat post-quantum cryptography migration as an operational risk problem right now.
If you've wondered how quantum actually lands inside a Fortune 200 boardroom — not the hype cycle version, but the "what do you actually tell the CFO" version — this episode maps that territory honestly. It's also useful listening if you're trying to understand the emerging talent gap, why the quiet in enterprise research publications may itself be a signal, and how a firm known for audit and advisory ends up doing multispectral analysis of chestnut trees on IBM quantum processors.
What We Get Into
Why KPMG split quantum into distinct practices — PQC, sensing, optimization, and research — and what that structural choice signals about market timing
How a PBS documentary about the American chestnut tree led to a peer-reviewed quantum ML paper with Kipu Quantum and IBM
The honest case for a 3% accuracy gain over classical ResNet-50 baselines — and why Aaron treats it as a positive-sum signal rather than a victory lap
Why "what makes a good quantum problem" remains the most important question in the field, and how KPMG's client base shapes their answer
The seven-step Q-PREP framework for post-quantum cryptography readiness, and why step one — knowing what you actually have — is the hardest step
How data-centric thinking (not cryptography-centric thinking) reframes the PQC migration challenge
Why the quiet in enterprise research publications from major financial institutions may itself be a market signal
The talent bottleneck: ~16,500 quantum researchers on the planet against a coming wave of enterprise demand
How AI tooling is compressing quantum research timelines, and what that means for who can enter the field
Why the compute stack of the next decade will be heterogeneous — quantum, neuromorphic, thermodynamic, and mechanical computing all coexisting
Resources & Links
Guest & Organization
Dr. Aaron Kemp — KPMG People Profile — Official bio covering Aaron's DoD/classified cybersecurity background and current role as US Quantum Leader.
On the 3% accuracy gain: "It's a positive game… we did a 12–15 week sprint, and to at least meet classical was our goal when we started. So when we actually did get three percent, it was repeatable. That was, to me, okay — there's something there."
On the real PQC problem: "We don't have a cryptographic problem. We have a data problem. None of these organizations know where their data flows."
On cybersecurity as a discipline: "Cybersecurity is probably the worst career field ever because perfect cybersecurity has no ROI — because nothing happens."
On enterprise timing:Insight: Aaron frames the quiet in financial services quantum research publications as a market signal — organizations may have stopped sharing because they're moving from research toward competitive advantage.
On the talent gap: "There's 16,500 quantum researchers on the planet… Fortune 200 will hire 16,000." A single tier of enterprise demand could exhaust the global talent pool.
Investing in the Quantum Frontier and the Road to Fault Tolerance with Barak Bussel
03 Aug 2026
00:40:21
Barak Bussel is one of the few people operating simultaneously at three levels of the quantum stack: deploying private capital into hardware and software companies through 7i Capital, chairing the strategic board of a major university quantum center, and helping stand up the physical infrastructure — a 700,000 square foot research park on the site of the former Westside Pavilion — meant to convene academia, industry, national labs, and startups in one place. He is also a physicist by training, which changes the kind of diligence questions he asks.
We recorded this at the KPMG Tech and Innovation Symposium in Deer Valley, only weeks after the most consequential stretch of quantum news in years: Oratomic's $300M Series A (the largest first institutional round in quantum history, with 7i in the syndicate), a Google Quantum AI paper cutting Shor's algorithm resource estimates to around 500,000 physical qubits on superconducting hardware, and two June 2026 White House executive orders on quantum innovation and post-quantum cryptography. If you want to understand how a serious investor is actually pricing risk, timelines, and ecosystem-building in this moment, this is the conversation.
What We Get Into
Why 7i backed Oratomic's aggressive "no intermediate product, straight to fault tolerance" strategy, and how Barak thinks about betting on teams versus theses in deep tech
How recent architecture and QLDPC error correction advances have compressed physical-to-logical qubit ratios, and what that means for near-term resource estimates for Shor's algorithm
Why a lesser-noticed April 2026 Google Quantum AI paper on quantum-assisted memory reduction for classical AI workloads may matter as much as the Shor's-focused headlines
What "patient capital" actually looks like when a connector problem eats two years of a portfolio company's roadmap
The Bell Labs template as a serious operating model for the UCLA Research Park: convening academia, industry, government, and startups in a single physical footprint
The historical resonance of UCLA sending the first ARPANET packet in 1969 and what that suggests about where quantum networking work should be anchored
How Kedma's error mitigation work with IBM's Heron II and RIKEN pushed a 51-qubit Ising model simulation to the edge of what's classically tractable
How Barak reads the June 2026 executive orders and the federal role — enabling infrastructure rather than picking winners — against the scale of Chinese government funding
On patient capital in hardware: "You're producing a new chip… all of a sudden a year and a half has passed." Barak's example of a photonics company that spent two years solving a flex connector problem is a useful ground truth for anyone modeling quantum hardware timelines.
On the role of universities: Industry has scale — the ability to throw 500 engineers at a problem. Academia brings "the quiet depth to think very deeply about a problem over an extended period of time, two or three generations ahead."
On resource estimates: The gap between the original 20-million-qubit Shor's estimates and the recent Google Quantum AI paper suggesting ~500,000 physical qubits on superconducting hardware, plus Oratomic's neutral-atom approach at the ten-thousand-qubit scale, represents a genuine compression of the fault-tolerance horizon.
On the underappreciated Google paper: An April 8 paper on using quantum processors to reduce memory requirements for massive classical data sets is, in Barak's view, the first rigorous demonstration that quantum could bend the exponential curve of AI compute demand.
On government's role: "Typically in the U.S., government is not the best at picking the winners and losers in the marketplace. But it's great at enabling." The El Segund...
Building the U.S. Quantum Supply Chain with Kate Timmerman
27 Jul 2026
00:41:39
Kate Timmerman is the CEO of the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), and she is arguably one of the most consequential ecosystem builders in quantum today. Under her leadership, the CQE has grown from three founding institutions in 2017 to a coalition of more than 50 industry and academic partners, and the region has secured designation as a top global quantum ecosystem through The Bloch Quantum U.S. EDA Tech Hub and an NSF Regional Innovation Engine development award.
If you care about how emerging deep-tech industries actually get built — the unglamorous work of coordinating universities, startups, national labs, small manufacturers, workforce agencies, and federal policy — this episode is a masterclass. It's especially valuable for listeners trying to understand how quantum moves from bespoke, hand-built prototypes to real industrial-scale production, and what that transition means for jobs, national security, and U.S. competitiveness.
What We Get Into
Why the CQE started 18 months before the National Quantum Initiative Act — and how that head start translated into winning multiple NQI research centers (SQMS, Q-NEXT, HQAN, and Q-NEXT-adjacent efforts)
What the $55M Bloch Tech Hub award actually funds in the next 12 months, and why the money targets manufacturing rather than more research
The severity of U.S. dependence on foreign and single-sourced quantum components — from nano-positioners to optics, photonics, and vacuum systems — and why that's slowing product delivery today
How small and mid-sized Midwest manufacturers (in states that already rank top-10 in U.S. manufacturing) can pivot into the quantum supply chain without full re-tooling
Why the BCG projection of ~$80B in regional economic impact and up to 191,000 quantum jobs by 2035 is more credible when you understand the full supply-chain vision, not just quantum computer vendors
The five pillars of the CQE's NSF-backed "Advancing Together" workforce strategy — awareness, preparation, mobility, employer leadership, and coordination — and why employers themselves often can't forecast their own hiring needs
What the Quantum Law Navigator™ is actually for, who uses it, and why first-time quantum founders often don't know what "export control" means until it's too late
Why Q2B is relocating its North America conference from Silicon Valley to Chicago in December 2026 — and what that signals about where the center of gravity is moving
On the 18-month head start: "When we hear an anecdote once or twice, we realize, if we're hearing it once or twice today, that means in two years the U.S. government's gonna hear about it." Kate's argument for why nimble ecosystem organizations have to move before the market signal is obvious.
On the supply chain problem: A significant portion of quantum components today are single-sourced and imported. That fragility, Kate argues, is quietly slowing every quantum company's ability to deliver products to customers — and it's the specific gap the Bloch award is designed to close.
On the manufacturing pivot: The Midwest already has top-10 manufacturing states, but those small and mid-sized shops "tend to be more mom and pop type shops, and they don't have R&D budgets" to speculatively re-tool for quantum. Federal implementation funding is the mechanism to bridge that gap.
On workforce reality: Employers "are so mission-focused on their tech development, they're not doing their own forecasts about what their jobs needs are gonna be in two and five years." Ecosystem organizations have to do that forecasting on behalf of the industry.
On what universities quietly subsidize: "The universities end up doing a lot of stuff for free… a lot of the preparing for the future that is not maybe of incredible priority at the moment, but that fundamental work, yes, on the research side, but also on the workforce development side, is incredibly important."
The Open Source Substrate for Quantum with Ben Castanon
20 Jul 2026
00:43:47
Ben Castanon became Unitary Foundation's first CEO in February 2026, after roughly four years with the organization as Chief of Staff and then COO. He came into quantum from an unusual direction — leadership roles at Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn arts-and-science center — and that background shows in how he thinks about scaffolding communities, funding public goods, and borrowing what works from other fields.
This conversation matters now because Unitary Foundation sits at an inflection point. It has scaled from a microgrant program (the "Unitary Fund") into a foundation with a global developer community, corporate members including NVIDIA and IBM, an active compiler collection, a benchmarking initiative, and an annual open-source survey that increasingly serves as the field's ground truth. If you care about how quantum computing actually gets built — not just who wins the hardware race — this episode lays out the infrastructure argument clearly.
What You'll Learn
Why Ben argues quantum open source falls into a structural funding gap between academia (chasing novel papers) and venture capital (chasing profitable businesses), and what philanthropy has to do about it
What "public goods" and "digital commons" actually look like in quantum — from benchmarking to compilation to error mitigation tooling
How to interpret the 2025 QOSS Survey finding that ~40% of full-time quantum OSS contributors are unpaid, and why Ben sees it as both an opportunity and a warning
How Unitary Foundation is experimenting with continuous compensation for contributors via bounty programs and pilots with Merit Systems
Why corporate members like NVIDIA and IBM invest in a vendor-neutral nonprofit — and how governance keeps the "open" in open source
What a healthy pipeline from first-time contributor to sustained open-source maintainer would look like, and why Ben wants an endowment behind it
Why Ben resists top-down definitions of the "open substrate" and prefers to let the community surface bottlenecks
The long-term vision: a "Linux moment" for quantum, and what it would take to install it before proprietary stacks lock in
On the structural gap: There are "third spaces" where projects don't fit the incentives of either a startup or an academic lab — but where the whole ecosystem benefits. Benchmarking is the clearest example.
On unpaid contributors: "We've developed the field to a place where we're starting to hit up against the classic open source community issues." The volunteer surge is real — but so is the risk of losing those contributors to better-paying fields if UF can't convert enthusiasm into compensation.
On why big companies join: A functional field needs people to hire. Ben's argument to corporate members is partly workforce development — thousands of developers getting on-the-job training on neutral, community-owned tools.
On the substrate: Ben resists top-down definitions of what belongs in the open substrate. "It's much better to have all of the practitioners giving voice to what open tools they need."
On his long-term ambition: Build a philanthropic endowment that funds the microgrant pipeline in perpetuity — because "I don't see that as ever becoming a resource that is not of use."
If you're building open-source quantum tools — or want to support the people who are — start at unitary.foundation.
...
Quantum Cameras and Sub-Diffraction Imaging with Johannes Galatsanos
13 Jul 2026
00:49:24
Johannes Galatsanos occupies an unusual dual perch in the quantum ecosystem. As a co-author of the inaugural MIT Quantum Index Report, he's helped map the entire quantum landscape at altitude; as co-founder and CEO of Diffraqtion, he's staked his career on one of its most under-discussed corners: quantum imaging. The company spun out of Saikat Guha's lab at the University of Maryland after more than a decade of DARPA-funded research, emerged from stealth in January 2026 with $4.2M in pre-seed funding, and is now racing toward on-sky telescope demonstrations and a 2028 satellite launch.
This episode is for listeners who want a technically honest look at where the "quantum" label is doing real work in a sensor versus where it's shading into sophisticated photonics and analog computing. If you care about how quantum technologies actually reach the world — through markets, contracts, and hardware that ships — this conversation gives you a specific, concrete example to think with.
What You'll Learn
Why a conventional camera can lose roughly 95% of the information a photon carries, and what quantum Fisher information theory says about recovering it
How Diffraqtion's device processes light directly in the photonic domain before converting it to electronic information — and why that matters for shot noise
The honest answer to "is this really quantum?" — including where the technology sits between quantum information theory, photonics, and analog computing
Why a 6U CubeSat with a 10-centimeter aperture can plausibly compete with school-bus-sized observation satellites for specific tasks
How a "diffractive neural network" runs image classification at the speed of light with negligible power consumption
The difference between Diffraqtion's hard-coded Gen 1 camera and the reprogrammable Gen 2 that can swap algorithms in orbit (canopy detection over the Amazon, ship detection over the Atlantic)
Why the Habitable Worlds Observatory needs a coronagraph capability — and how you can build one by processing light rather than blocking it
What quantum sensing needs from policy, capital, and PR to escape the shadow of quantum computing
Resources & Links
Guest & Company
Diffraqtion — Company homepage; describes the technology, NASA/DARPA lineage, and the "quantum eye" framing referenced in the conversation.
Johannes Galatsanos on LinkedIn — Recent activity including SmallSat Europe, the NASA Space to Soil Challenge, and GQIG Summit talks on quantum imaging.
Papers & Reports
Quantum Index Report 2025 (arXiv) — The preprint of the MIT QIR, co-authored by Galatsanos. Essential reading for anyone trying to see the quantum landscape as a whole.
On quantum information loss: "When you do a direct image… you lose something like 95% of information from that photon. So you leave 95% on the table, and the question was: how do you extract that back?"
On what "quantum" really means here: Galatsanos is refreshingly candid — the device uses quantum Fisher information theory to set the physical limit and configure the hardware, but the runtime processing is closer to analog photonic computing than to gate-based quantum computing. He describes it as sitting between "quantum 1.0" and quantum sensing.
On the frog's-eye analogy: Retinal ganglion cells can process shapes and trajectories faster than the brain — which is why you can catch a baseball or a falling fork before you consciously see it. Diffraqtion is trying to give satellites and robots the same kind of reflex.
On the JPEG as a historical artifact: "JPEG was a little bit of a logical step… but now the thought is, forget about it — you don't even need that. The light itself already will tell you." The machine, unlike a human operator, doesn't need an image.
On why quantum sensing lags in the discourse: Insight — quantum computing benefits from a single unifying narrative that every vendor can pull on. Quantum sensing has to invent its own story from scratch for each modality, which is a structural PR disadvantage more than a technical one.
Episode 100: Live at Barnes & Thornburg — Reflections on the First 100 Episodes
06 Jul 2026
01:19:58
This is the 100th episode of The New Quantum Era, and it arrives at a moment of convergence: the book is out, the Helgoland centennial documentary is in production, regional quantum ecosystems are scaling from ambition to construction, and the field is entering the transition from heroic-era qubit demos to the hard systems engineering that will determine whether quantum computing becomes a real industry. Bob Karr — who sits at the intersection of law, policy, and the quantum ecosystem as the person behind the Quantum Law Navigator and a convener across the Chicago quantum community — is the right person to conduct this retrospective, and Barnes & Thornburg, at the center of arguably the most sophisticated quantum ecosystem in the world, is the right place to do it.
The conversation is structured as a celebration and an examination: what has Sebastian actually learned by sitting with nearly 100 physicists, engineers, founders, and policymakers? How has the field changed since that first visit to TJ Watson in 2017? What do regional hubs like the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and Quebec's DistriQ tell us about what it takes to move from science to industry? And what does the next era demand — not just from researchers and companies, but from everyone?
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What You'll Learn
Why the Helgoland documentary matters: in June 2025, Sebastian and his wife traveled to the island where Heisenberg's 1925 insight gave birth to quantum mechanics, producing a documentary at a Yale–Max Planck centennial conference attended by multiple Nobel laureates — and what that experience distilled about the state of the field
How Sebastian's journey into quantum began: arriving at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in 2017 to help with Qiskit's open source strategy, encountering the 53-qubit milestone, and recognizing the earliest stages of an emerging technology that would become his life's work
What the "Heroic Age of Qubits" was — and why it ended: the period of genius PIs racing to prove quantum advantage, culminating in Google's 2019 random circuit sampling claim, and why that finish line turned out to be a starting line
What Harley Johnson and the IQMP reveal about ecosystem-building: why the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is the world's leading example of building a quantum ecosystem, and what it takes to bridge deep science and economic development
What Quebec's DistriQ teaches about sustainability: the 90% public / 10% private funding model designed to flip over ten years, and why that benchmark matters for every regional hub
Why Alejandra Castillo's economic development lens changed the picture: how quantum's impact extends far beyond qubits into advanced manufacturing, supply chain, and the communities that get to participate in the upside
What Nadya Mason's leadership model means for the field: the dean of UChicago's Pritzker School who wasn't a "math person" and sees leadership as service — and why the field needs every kind of creative mind, not just PhDs in physics
What John Martinis's arc from the 1986 Josephson junction paper through the Nobel Prize to CoLab reveals: the transition from heroic-era physicist to systems thinker pursuing open architecture and consortium-based quantum computing
Why the Monte Carlo algorithm is the key analogy for quantum's future: the technique that took 30 years to find its commercial application as a reminder that the most important uses of quantum computers haven't been imagined yet
Where fault tolerance actually stands: why it's an emergent property of the whole system — not a single breakthrough — and why the classical-quantum feedback loop for mid-circuit measurement and syndrome correction is the thing to watch
Why multiple qubit modalities will coexist: the case for neutral atoms in the near term, superconducting and spin qubits in the long term, and photonics as a dark horse — and why this isn't a winner-take-all race
What Build Quantum Partners is building: a new venture to reduce friction for quantum companies entering the U.S. market, partner with regional ecosystems, and ultimately develop the quantum equivalent of biotech hub infrastructure
The New Quantum Era by Sebastian Hassinger — Released May 2026; the companion book tracing the people, science, and engineering behind quantum technology's emergence
Helgoland Documentary — In production; shot over five days at the Yale–Max Planck centennial conference on the island where Heisenberg formulated matrix mechanics in 1925
Quantum EDA for Ion Trap Design with Daniel Faircloth
29 Jun 2026
00:38:42
Daniel Faircloth, PhD is an unusual figure in the quantum ecosystem: a computational electromagnetics engineer who actually helped build trapped-ion hardware before pivoting to the software stack the field was missing. He's a co-author on the 2013 New Journal of Physics paper that demonstrated reliable ion transport through a microfabricated X-junction surface-electrode trap at Georgia Tech Research Institute, and he spent the years afterward inside a defense contractor, IERUS Technologies, building the electromagnetic simulation engine that has now spun out as Nullspace.
If you've been following the trapped-ion race — Quantinuum, IonQ, Oxford Ionics, AQT, and the academic groups feeding them — this episode fills in a layer of the story that rarely gets airtime. As the field moves from clever physics demonstrations toward genuinely scaled architectures, the design tools, the file formats, and the iteration loops start to matter as much as the qubits themselves. Listeners interested in quantum engineering, the analog of EDA in semiconductors, or how dual-use defense R&D translates into commercial quantum infrastructure will find a lot to chew on.
What We Get Into
Why the standard "gapless approximation" for ion trap modeling — treating electrodes as polygons on an infinite metal sheet — breaks down well before you're ready to fabricate.
How Faircloth's graduate-school question ("can better tools turn a good engineer into a super engineer?") became the design philosophy behind Nullspace ES.
What turning an X-junction corner actually requires: two-stage optimization across trap geometry and control voltages, so the ion doesn't get heated out of the trap.
Why general-purpose electrostatic solvers struggle with ion trap problems that demand nanometer ion-height precision and millivolt-level shuttling voltage accuracy.
The technical leap in Nullspace ES 2025 R1: pairing high-order basis functions with a compression solver to cut memory usage roughly 5× while preserving accuracy.
The awkward commercial reality of selling neutral simulation infrastructure to companies that are direct competitors with each other.
The "build vs. buy" tension for hardware startups deciding whether to roll their own solver in Python or adopt a purpose-built commercial tool.
How the dual-use defense / commercial-quantum positioning shapes Nullspace's roadmap — and where lessons flow in both directions.
Where the roadmap might lead: multi-physics, tightly integrated workflows that eliminate the CAD-cleanup and file-format-exchange tax engineers pay today.
On the original product question (paraphrase): If you give powerful EM and optimization tools to a well-trained engineer, can you effectively turn them into a "super engineer" and unlock the kind of creativity that textbook parameterizations can't reach? That question became the through-line from Daniel's graduate work to Nullspace.
On why existing tools fall short (paraphrase): The community was trying to shoehorn ion trap design into solvers that were never built for it — gapless approximations, weak optimizers, and accuracy levels that simply don't hold up when you need nanometer ion heights and millivolt shuttling voltages.
On corner-turning in an X-junction (Daniel, lightly edited): "If you think of an ion trap as a fancy train track system, the ions are being shuttled around — you need to be able to turn left and turn right as you grow and scale. How do you get the ion to turn but not get heated in that process and lose the ion?"
On serving competing customers (paraphrase): A rising tide floats all boats. The better the underlying simulation tools, the more sophisticated the architectures every team can attempt — and the more chances the field has of someone breaking through.
On the long-term vision (Daniel): "Being able to provide all of that in an appropriate fidelity, one-stop shop for the designers. I don't want them to have to go to a bunch of different tools and try to kind of piece together dealing with file format exchange issues."
EeroQ is unusual in two ways. It's the only company in the world commercializing electrons-on-helium qubits, a modality first proposed by Platzman and Dykman in Science in 1999. And it was founded by Nick Farina — a software entrepreneur, not a physicist — who got pulled into the field through a Chicago theater board where he met his future co-founder, then-PhD student Johannes Pollanen.
This conversation matters now because EeroQ has had an unusually productive twelve months: a Physical Review X paper demonstrating single-electron control above 1 Kelvin, a January 2026 result on controlling up to a million electrons with fewer than 50 control lines, and — published in Nature Physics on June 15, 2026 — the first demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, the cavity-QED readout-and-control link the platform depends on. If you're trying to understand which "second-tier" modalities deserve serious attention — and how a small, capital-light team in Chicago is thinking about scale-first hardware design — this is a useful listen.
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.
How a Chicago theater board led to one of the most unique qubit companies in the field
Why electrons-on-helium failed in the early 2000s and why circuit QED, dry fridges, and CMOS now make it viable
The physical picture: a thin superfluid helium film coating a CMOS chip, with electrons trapped a few nanometers above the surface by their own image charge
Why EeroQ pivoted from motional states to spin qubits after Steve Lyon (Princeton) joined as CTO — and the predicted 10+ second coherence times that come with it
The "build a quantum computer in reverse" philosophy: starting from a million-qubit architecture and working back toward two-qubit gates
How the "Wonder Lake" chip controls 2,432 future qubit sites today, and why that's an engineering milestone rather than a qubit count
Honest framing of where EeroQ actually is: no two-qubit gate demonstrated yet, with a tape-out target of ~10,000 qubits by late 2028
Why dipole-dipole gates come first and exchange gates come later, borrowing from the spin qubit playbook
The case that scaling — not qubit quality — has been the field's slowest-moving problem over the last decade
Resources & Links
Guest & Company
EeroQ — Company site for the only commercial electron-on-helium quantum hardware effort.
Electron-on-helium qubit (Wikipedia) — Useful overview including the original 1999 Platzman & Dykman Science proposal and Steve Lyon's 2006 spin-qubit paper in Physical Review A.
On the contrarian thesis: "Scaling is actually the hardest part of building a quantum computer." Nick argues the field has made real strides on gate fidelity, error correction, and algorithms over the last decade — but not nearly enough on the path to hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits.
On building in reverse: Rather than starting from a two-qubit gate and "hoping and praying to find ways to scale," EeroQ started by asking what a million-qubit processor would have to look like — which forced the choice of CMOS as the only manufacturing technology humanity has ever used to build features at that scale.
On honest status: "We d...
Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco
15 Jun 2026
00:45:09
Why This Episode Matters
Sabrina Maniscalco is one of the few people in quantum who has lived the full arc: two decades of academic work on open quantum systems and non-Markovian noise at Palermo, Turku, Edinburgh, and Helsinki, followed by founding Algorithmiq with three of her former researchers after an early Qiskit Camp. That trajectory matters now because Algorithmiq just had a landmark stretch — sole winner of the $2M Wellcome Leap Q4Bio prize for a quantum-enabled cancer drug discovery workflow, an €18M Series B, a global HQ move to Milan, and its Tensor Network Error Mitigation (TEM) function landing in IBM's Qiskit Functions catalog.
If you're trying to make sense of where quantum software actually creates value before fault tolerance arrives — and what a credible "trajectory to advantage" looks like when paired with real clients in life sciences — this is a grounded, technically specific conversation with someone building it.
EPISODE SPONSOR
This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.
Why a background in open quantum systems and non-Markovian noise turned out to be unusually well-suited to running algorithms on noisy near-term hardware
The actual science behind the Q4Bio winning workflow: simulating excited-state dynamics of a photosensitizer drug already in Phase II clinical trials, on up to 100 qubits
How quantum-boosted DMRG works — and why it gives you a built-in benchmark against the best classical method via the bond dimension
The tradeoff Sabrina would and wouldn't make between more qubits and lower noise, and why neutral atoms' slower sampling rates matter for chemistry
Why even fault-tolerant algorithms like quantum phase estimation still depend on getting state initialization and measurement right
Algorithmiq's two-product structure: the Digital Quantum Interface (hardware-agnostic infrastructure) and the life sciences application framework
How methods built for chemistry are now opening doors into optimization and GenAI — and why that direction emerged from the work, not from a strategy deck
What the move from Helsinki to Milan signals about the European quantum ecosystem and Algorithmiq's commercial scale-up
How an active learning pipeline is already proposing novel drug variants for synthesis in Prof. Sherri McFarland's lab
Resources & Links
Guest & Company
Algorithmiq — The company Sabrina co-founded with Guillermo García-Pérez, Matteo Rossi, and Boris Sokolov; quantum software for life sciences and chemistry.
Sabrina Maniscalco — AI for Good Bio — Consolidated bio covering academic roles and advisory positions, including IQOQI Austria and CERN's Quantum Technology Initiative.
On the foundation of the company's approach: "We learned very early what we thought were the bottlenecks of quantum computers — what you really need to worry about if you want to implement computation at scale." A direct line from Qiskit Camp Vermont to Algorithmiq's product strategy.
On Q4Bio, in Sabrina's words: "This molecule is already in Phase II clinical trial. So it's not hydrogen. It's a real molecule." A useful counter to the common critique that quantum chemistry demos still live in toy-model land.
On quantum-boosted DMRG (insight): In the worst case, the method matches the best classical technique; in the better case, it outperforms it — and the bond dimension tells you which regime you're in. Built-in benchmarking against the classical baseline.
On the hardware tradeoff: Asked whether she'd prefer 100 higher-fidelity qubits or 200 noisier ones, Sabrina's answer is "it depends" — and the explanation about why neutral atoms' lower sampling rates limit chemistry use cases is one of the more concrete things you'll hear on platform tradeoffs.
On strategy (insight): New verticals at Algorithmiq are ...
Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures
08 Jun 2026
00:46:02
Why This Episode Matters
Firgun Ventures launched in late 2025 with a $70M first close anchored by the Qatar Investment Authority and a mandate that doesn't exist anywhere else in the market: lead Series A and B rounds in quantum scale-ups globally. Kris Naudts is a neuroscientist and former Culture Trip founder whose path to quantum runs through a near-fatal medical misdiagnosis. Zeynep Koruturk spent over a decade building the Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative and meeting more than a thousand founders. Both were early angels in what became Quantinuum.
If you're trying to understand how quantum companies actually get financed between the lab and the IPO window — or why a specialist fund needed to exist at all — this conversation is one of the clearest views available. It's also a useful frame for founders thinking about what an informed institutional investor actually does in a round.
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.
Why Kris's ALS misdiagnosis became the conviction event that pulled him from media entrepreneurship into quantum investing
How Zeynep's decade at Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative shaped her pattern-matching for deep tech, and where that pattern-matching breaks down in quantum
The structural reason Series A/B is the real bottleneck in quantum financing — and why precede and seed capital is no longer the gap people assume it is
How Firgun underwrites engineering and execution risk after the scientific risk is largely retired
Why a quantum-specialist fund unlocks soft commitments from larger institutions that otherwise stay on the sidelines
The role of Firgun's "scientific co-founder" Professor Mete Atatüre and the need for sub-specialist diligence across modalities
How Firgun thinks about portfolio construction across silicon-spin/photonic (Photonic Inc.), silicon CMOS (Quantum Motion), and other architectures without picking a qubit winner
Why a truly global mandate is a feature, not a focus problem, given how concentrated quantum talent is in roughly a dozen ecosystems
How sovereign capital, US equity-stake announcements, and geopolitical fragmentation are starting to reshape who can invest in what
Why the binary "fault-tolerant or bust" framing of quantum investing misses the gradient of capability that drives near-term value
Resources & Links
Guest & Firm
Firgun Ventures — The fund's homepage, with the team and "Time to Talk Quantum" podcast featuring the founders' own framing of the market.
Kris on the conviction event: "If you're expecting to die and then you're told you're going to live, you have to rethink it yet again… You can go in the direction of enjoy every day, or you can go in the direction of let's try to do something meaningful with whatever time I have left."
Zeynep on the real bottleneck: Pre-seed and seed capital in quantum is no longer the gap — the A and B rounds are. Roughly 40% of companies in the space need that bridge to unlock larger institutional capital, and almost no one is set up to lead it.
Kris on diligence limits: No one person can underwrite the full quantum stack. Firgun pairs a "scientific co-founder" with sub-specialists for each modality, because in quantum "no propositions sound stupid" — and that's exactly the problem.
Zeynep on the asymmetric bet: Quantum is one of the few areas where geopolitical reality creates a floor under the downside. The West can't afford to lose, which means funding will be there long enough for the right companies to mature.
Kris on willing the timeline: "You cannot will it into being. The space will evolve at the pace it is set to evolve with the capital and the talent in it." A useful corrective for anyone pitching a five-year cure-for-Parkinson's roadmap.
Related Episodes
Quantum Book Launch with Yuval Boger
01 Jun 2026
00:54:34
Why This Episode Matters
Yuval has a rare profile in the quantum industry: an M.Sc. in physics from Tel Aviv University, an MBA from Kellogg, two decades as a CEO and CMO in deep tech before quantum, and now the commercial lead at QuEra — the company whose neutral-atom architecture is colocated with NVIDIA H100s inside Japan's ABCI-Q supercomputer and just demonstrated 96 logical qubits from 448 physical atoms in Nature. He also hosts The Superposition Guy's Podcast and has just published Quantum Bits, a comic-book guide to quantum computing.
This is a crossover conversation — Sebastian's book A New Quantum Era came out the same week — so the episode reads as two practitioners comparing their explanatory strategies, their reading of the modality race, and their honest forecasts for when a quantum computer becomes genuinely non-simulatable. If you want a candid look at how the commercial side of quantum thinks about hardware timelines, error-correction overhead, and the work of translating physics into procurement, this is the episode.
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.
Why Vladan Vuletić's confidence horizon for neutral atoms expanded from 5 years to 10 years in a single 18-month window — and what changed
The honest case for neutral atoms when wall-clock speed is the obvious weakness: parallelism, algorithmic fault tolerance, and a 2:1 physical-to-logical ratio for quantum memory
Why "time to solution" — not gate speed — is the metric Yuval thinks the industry should be arguing about
How Shor's algorithm went from requiring a million qubits to roughly 30,000, and what that compression means for cryptographically relevant timelines
The craft problem of explaining quantum without saying "zero and one at the same time" — and why both Yuval and Sebastian refused to use it
What it took to make a quantum comic funny in German (the German is perfect, the joke is not)
Sebastian's read on the modality race: neutral atoms short-term, superconducting mid-term, spin and photonics long-term — and Yuval's pushback
Why Yuval thinks Sebastian's five-year forecast for a non-simulatable machine is pessimistic
The shift inside QuEra from "95% science, 5% everything else" to a company that has to ship serviceable systems and uptime
How podcasting becomes a business development tool once the microphone is off
Resources & Links
Guest Links
The Superposition Guy's Podcast — Yuval's interview show with quantum CEOs and technical leaders across computing, sensing, and communications.
Quantum Bits Comics — Yuval's comic-book guide to quantum computing, including custom editions and multilingual versions.
QuEra Computing — The neutral-atom quantum computing company where Yuval serves as Chief Commercial Officer.
Yuval's published writing — Aggregated Forbes, HPCwire, and Built In bylines on quantum ROI, workforce, and commercialization.
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder — Sebastian's inspiration for the working title of his next book.
Key Quotes & Insights
On the magic of neutral atoms: "We've got this rubidium atoms, we hold them in place using tiny lasers, they're four microns apart, we shoot lasers, and then we take a photograph and see how they're doing. It's science fiction until it isn't."
On the modality timeline (Yuval, paraphrasing Vladan Vuletić): Eighteen months ago Vladan was confident about neutral atoms for the next five years. Six months ago, after recent results, that confidence horizon stretched to ten.
On what actually matters: "Obviously what matters is time to solution and not clock speed." Yuval's core rebuttal to the standard critique that neutral-atom gates are slow.
On the error-correction compression: A recent Harvard result showed the physical-to-logical qubit ratio for quantum memory dropping toward roughly 2:1 — not the thousand-to-one figure that dominates most public discourse.
On the takeaway from his book (Yuval): "Quantum is magical, but it's not magic."
Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias Christandl
25 May 2026
00:38:46
Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias Christandl
Why This Episode Matters
Most discussions of fault tolerance quietly assume a classical-in, classical-out picture: you feed in bits, the noisy quantum machine does its work, and a stable classical answer comes out the other side. Christandl — a mathematically trained quantum information theorist who also leads a Novo Nordisk Foundation–funded life sciences center — argues that this framing is too narrow for the era we are actually entering, where multi-core processors, networked QPUs, and quantum communication links all need to exchange quantum information between noisy machines.
If you care about how quantum networks, distributed quantum computers, and quantum simulation workflows for chemistry and biology actually get built, this episode lays out a foundational way of thinking about the problem and connects it directly to current hardware and algorithm co-design.
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It’s time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.
Why the fault tolerance theorem as usually stated leaves out the case that matters most for networking: quantum inputs and quantum outputs.
How Christandl's group shows you can still prepare arbitrarily complex quantum states on a noisy machine, paying only one final layer of physical noise rather than collapsing the whole computation.
What this means for restoring meaning to quantum channel capacity results in the presence of noisy encoders and decoders.
Why distributed quantum computing — multi-core QPUs talking to each other in quantum, not classical, information — is the natural setting for this work.
How recent quantum LDPC code work fits in, and why the team is now focused on making encoders and decoders more space-efficient.
Christandl's debate with Gil Kalai: which skeptical assumptions are worth taking seriously, and which he thinks the fault tolerance machinery is robust against.
The Quantum for Life workflow: zooming in on the quantum-relevant region of a protein–ligand interaction, running a small quantum simulation, and feeding the result into a classical machine-learning pipeline that needs many such small computations.
Why "co-design" has replaced "bridging the gap" as the right metaphor for where quantum hardware and quantum software meet.
How quantum sensing — for example, magnetic-field sensing with atomic clouds — could one day deliver genuine quantum inputs into a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
On reframing fault tolerance: Christandl argues that the fault tolerance theorem, as usually stated, assumes classical inputs and outputs — but the most important near-term use cases, from networked QPUs to multi-core processors, need quantum inputs and quantum outputs.
On the unavoidable final layer of noise: "There will always be a final layer of noise being applied" when a noisy machine prepares a quantum state — and that single layer, not the whole computation, is the real price you pay.
On the new metaphor: "A few years back, I would have told you the really important thing is bridging the gap between the hardware and the software. Now it's not anymore about bridging the gap. It's about working together."
On Kalai's skepticism: Christandl finds the debate clarifying rather than threatening — the fault tolerance techniques look robust to the noise-model perturbations skeptics raise, and the engineering question is which code, not whether codes work at all.
On what quantum advantage in life sciences might actually look like: Not one heroic simulation, but many small, exact quantum computations feeding training data into a much larger classical machine-learning workflow that predicts protein–ligand interactions.
Related Episodes
Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull
18 May 2026
00:42:19
Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull
Why This Episode Matters
Elise Crull is Associate Professor of Philosophy at CCNY and the CUNY Graduate Center, co-author with Guido Bacciagaluppi of The Einstein Paradox (Cambridge, 2024), and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2025 for her archival work recovering voices like Grete Hermann from the foundations of quantum mechanics. She was also one of the speakers on Helgoland in June 2025 for the centenary of quantum mechanics — opening, as Sebastian notes, by thanking the organizers for the courage to invite a philosopher.
This conversation matters because the truce between physicists and philosophers of physics is over. Quantum computing has turned interpretive questions — what counts as entanglement, what decoherence really is, whether causal order can be put in superposition — into engineering questions with budget consequences. If you build, fund, or write about quantum hardware, this episode will sharpen how you hear the words being used around you.
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It’s time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.
Why "decoherence" and "noise" are not interchangeable, and why error correction strategy depends on telling them apart
The six-plus working definitions of entanglement currently circulating in physics — and why "classical entanglement" makes a philosopher's eye twitch
What Einstein actually objected to in EPR (hint: it wasn't really determinism), drawn from Schrödinger's "Einstein-Paradoxon" correspondence folder
Indefinite causal ordering: whether the experimental speedups reflect genuinely acausal physics or our stubbornly classical definitions of "cause" and "signal"
How monogamy of entanglement is only monogamous with respect to a single degree of freedom — and why that nuance is already being exploited in entanglement harvesting
Why "it's just a tool" is the most insidious thing an engineer can say about quantum or AI technology
How the standard heroic-origin story of quantum mechanics structurally erased experimentalists — many of them women like Hertha Sponer — and what that pattern predicts about quantum computing's own emerging origin story
What Grete Hermann did to von Neumann's impossibility proof forty years before anyone listened
Why Crull thinks the next physical theory, whatever succeeds quantum field theory, is likely to be stranger, not tamer
On what philosophy is for: "Every aspect of science we do requires interpretation, because the world isn't just out there. We make choices about how to encounter it."
On decoherence vs. noise: Crull notes the question physicists at Duke recently raised with her — how do you tell the difference between decoherence and noise? — and stresses that one is something you shield against, the other is something else entirely. Error correction strategy depends on the distinction.
On what really bothered Einstein: Despite the popular story, "He wasn't as concerned about determinism as you would think." What Einstein wanted was a theory whose mathematics had a one-to-one mapping to individual systems with their own states — and entanglement broke that.
On indefinite causal order: Experimentalists often equate causation with signaling constraints, but "those are very different things." The superposition-of-causal-orders results may reveal less about causation than about the fact that temporal ordering itself remains defined in irreducibly classical ways.
The Quantum Control Stack with Niels Bultink
11 May 2026
00:37:15
Why This Episode Matters
Niels Bultink earned his PhD at QuTech under Leonardo DiCarlo, where he performed some of the first real-time feedback experiments on solid-state qubits — the foundational primitive behind quantum error correction. He spun Qblox out of TU Delft in 2018, and has grown it to roughly 140 people serving 150+ customers worldwide, mostly on revenue rather than venture capital, before raising a $26M Series A in 2024.
This conversation matters now because the goalposts for useful quantum computing have moved closer in the last 12 months. Recent estimates suggest breaking RSA may need ~10,000–100,000 qubits, not tens of millions — and at that scale, the control stack is no longer a lab afterthought. It is a strategic supply chain question, which is why the DOE just picked Qblox to manufacture Fermilab's QICK platform domestically. If you care about how quantum computers actually get built — the layer between the qubit and the software — this is the episode for you.
Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It’s time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.
Why the IBM Quantum Experience originally needed a meter of rack equipment per qubit, and what had to change architecturally to scale past that
How a quantum control stack can be genuinely qubit-agnostic — and where modality differences actually live (mostly in the analog front end, not the digital core)
Why pre-compiled pulse sequences hit a wall, and how dynamic, adaptive control is a prerequisite for fault tolerance, not a nice-to-have
The role of Qblox's SYNQ and LINQ protocols in achieving picosecond-level synchronization and low-latency feedback across hundreds of cores
Why FPGAs are the right substrate today, and why the field will need to move toward ASICs as production volumes grow
The strategic logic behind manufacturing Fermilab's open-source QICK platform — and how it complements rather than cannibalizes the Qblox Cluster
What the Quantum Utility Block partnership with QuantWare and Q-CTRL actually delivers, including a full-stack demo built in a weekend at APS March Meeting
Why Qblox opened a Boston HQ and started U.S. manufacturing in Canton, Massachusetts in 2026, and how geopolitics is reshaping quantum supply chains
Niels's read on which qubit modalities are gaining ground fastest right now — including a notable jump in spin qubits and neutral atoms
What's special about the Dutch quantum ecosystem, and why a value-chain culture produced multiple revenue-driven hardware companies
Resources & Links
Guest & Company
Qblox — Delft-based control stack company at the center of this episode
Niels Bultink on Google Scholar — Niels's research record from his QuTech years, useful background on his feedback control work
On why the control stack is more than picks and shovels: "Sometimes companies like us are called picks and shovels. It's a nice analogy, but it doesn't hold entirely. The qubits are just the bottom layer of the stack — and all the other layers are also crucial to develop."
On flexibility as a requirement, not a feature: Pre-compiled, rigid sequences can't support quantum error correction. Adaptive, real-time control flows aren't a performance upgrade — they're "a basic need for this new era of quantum fault tolerance."
On the moving goalposts for useful quantum computing: A year ago, breaking RSA looked like tens of millions of qubits. Recent estimates put it at 10,000–100,000 — "a factor hundred smaller what we now think we need versus a year ago."
On the future of FPGAs: FPGAs are the right substrate for today's flexibility, but already at current production volumes, "it makes more sense to put things in chips, in ASICs."
On the Dutch ecosystem: What sets Delft apart isn't a slogan about ecosystems but a value-chain culture — companies that focus on one layer, work together, and grow on customer revenue rather than venture rounds.
Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy
04 May 2026
00:38:13
Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy
Izhar Medalsy is not a career qubit theorist. His path runs from a physical chemistry PhD and an ETH Zurich postdoc in atomic force microscopy and ternary nanoscale logic, through productizing scientific instruments at Bruker, through building one of the fastest resin 3D printers on the market, into co-founding Quantum Elements in 2023 with Daniel Lidar (USC) and Amir Yacoby (Harvard). That arc — nanoscale measurement scientist turned deep-tech operator — shapes how he thinks about the simulation gap in quantum computing.
The conversation lands at a specific moment. In April 2026, Quantum Elements published a joint result with AWS, USC, and Harvard simulating a distance-7 rotated surface code with 97 physical qubits using full quantum master equations on AWS HPC7a, and announced a deeper collaboration with Rigetti Computing on next-generation superconducting processors. If you care about how error correction strategies, decoders, and pulse-level controls actually get developed before they ever touch hardware, this episode is for you.
EPISODE SPONSOR
This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It’s time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.
Why generic noise models fall short and what "hardware-faithful" actually means when two nominally identical QPUs have different noise fingerprints
How Quantum Elements scaled open-system master-equation simulation from a brute-force ceiling around 16 qubits to 97 qubits using stochastic compression on top of Quantum Monte Carlo
The compute reality of the distance-7 surface code run on AWS HPC7a — only 96 vCPUs and a few hundred gigabytes of memory, not the thousands of vCPUs they initially feared
Why decoders are the invisible bottleneck in fault tolerance, and where AI-trained decoders fed by digital twin data could plausibly run inside the real-time quantum-classical loop
Extending error suppression from physical qubits up to logical qubits — the IBM Eagle work where digital-twin-guided strategies reportedly took entangled logical qubit fidelity from 43% to 95%
How the same digital twin approach extends to neutral atoms (live today) and ion traps (on the roadmap)
What Rigetti gets out of the partnership, what it means to have Chad Rigetti on the board, and how Constellation fits alongside real hardware time
Izhar's "wooden models in the air tunnel" critique of how the quantum industry currently iterates — and what a parallel virtual development track buys you
"Sometimes when I look at the quantum industry, there are instances where you think, well, it's almost like building the next fighter jet with wooden models in the air tunnel." — Izhar's framing for why the field needs a real simulation layer.
On hardware awareness: each modality, each QPU, sometimes each calibration cycle has its own pulses, its own noise processes, and its own failure modes. You cannot build the control stack without modeling where you are starting from and where you are trying to get to.
Insight: The brute-force ceiling for open-system master-equation simulation is roughly 16 qubits. Stochastic compression layered on Quantum Monte Carlo is what let Quantum Elements reach distance-7 surface code at 97 qubits — exploiting sparsity rather than enumerating the full state space.
On logical qubits: "We cannot assume that logical qubits will be noise-free." Error suppression strategies developed at the physical level need to be re-derived at the logical level, and digital twins are how you train and test those strategies before hardware.
Insight: The most interesting downstream story may not be simulation itself but AI decoders trained on digital-twin-generated data — small enough to run at the edge, fast enough to live inside the real-time quantum-classical loop.
Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch
27 Apr 2026
00:45:16
Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch
Ivan Deutsch is Distinguished Regents' Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico and the founding director of CQuIC, the Center for Quantum Information and Control. Along with his longtime collaborator Poul Jessen, Ivan helped lay the theoretical foundations for neutral-atom quantum computing in the 1990s: trapping individual atoms in optical lattices, cooling them to near absolute zero, and shuttling them in parallel to perform quantum logic. The companies commercializing those ideas today — QuEra, Pasqal, Atom Computing, Infleqtion, and the newly announced Aurora out of Caltech — are building on architectural concepts that trace directly to his group's early papers. His 9,600+ citations across quantum information, atomic physics, and quantum control place him among the most-cited theorists in the field.
The reason to talk to Ivan now is that he has been making a quietly heterodox argument: every one of those commercial platforms encodes information in two energy levels of an atom that has ten or sixteen, and Ivan thinks the field should be asking whether that's the right choice — not for information density, which is only a logarithmic gain, but for fault tolerance. This conversation goes deep on qudits, spin cat codes, and the co-design philosophy that has shaped Ivan's career at the interface between theory and experiment, ions and neutral atoms, and academia and industry. If you are following neutral-atom hardware, fault-tolerant quantum error correction, or the emergence of regional quantum ecosystems, this episode is essential.
What You'll Learn
Why neutral atoms were the "underdog cousins" of trapped ions — and the precise trade-off at the heart of a 30-year rivalry: ions are great and terrible because they're charged; neutral atoms are great and terrible because they're neutral
What the original neutral-atom quantum computing paper actually got right: the parallel atom-movement architecture now central to QuEra, Atom Computing, and Infleqtion's roadmaps was already there — even if the Rydberg blockade's full power wasn't appreciated until later
What qudits are and why fault tolerance, not information density, is the compelling argument: the information gain from base-2 to base-10 is only logarithmic, but co-designing error-correcting codes with the physical structure of the hardware may be transformative
How spin cat codes work: using the extra energy levels inside a single atom for error redundancy, directly analogous to bosonic cat codes in microwave cavities, with fault-tolerant thresholds that may surpass standard qubit surface codes
Why biased error correction matters: real physical errors in neutral atoms aren't arbitrary, and codes designed around the dominant error channels — including leakage and erasure — can dramatically outperform worst-case generic schemes
How leakage becomes an asset: when population escapes the qubit subspace into other levels, detecting that escape converts it from an unknown error into an erasure error, which is far easier to correct
Why working at interfaces is where the creative work happens: Ivan's career has been built at the boundary between theory and experiment, between ion-trap and neutral-atom communities, and now between research and industry
How New Mexico became a quantum hub: the founding of QNM-I, the partnership with Colorado, and the Elevate Quantum Tech Hub — turning decades of national-lab and university strength into an actual industrial ecosystem
Spin-cat code paper (ResearchGate) — The fault-tolerant encoding proposal that embeds a qubit in a large-spin qudit, analogous to bosonic cat codes; fault-tolerant thresholds that surpass standard qubit-based encodings
UNM/QNM-I Ecosystem Update (Feb 2026) — The current state of the New Mexico quantum industrial ecosystem, including Quantinuum, QuEra, and QNet presence in Albuquerque
Elevate Quantum profile — Background on the only quantum-focused EDA Tech Hub in the country
"Ions are great because they're charged. You can hold onto them very tightly and manipulate them extremely precisely. Ions are terrible because they're charged — you can't push many together and they all talk to one another." — Ivan Deutsch, on the fundamental ion/neutral-atom trade-off at the heart of a 30-year platform rivalry
"I don't want to be an evangelist, because I don't really feel I've studied this well enough to say we really should do quantum computation base-10 rather than base-two. But I think it's an important question." — Ivan Deutsch, on qudits — a carefully calibrated position from a theorist making a strong technical bet
"We just wanted to make the whole thing faster." — Steve Rolston (Ivan's co-author), on the mindset behind the Rydberg blockade paper, which ultimately unlocked the entire commercial neutral-atom industry
Insight: The spin cat code ...
Quantum Chemistry's Classical Limits with Garnet Chan
20 Apr 2026
00:41:13
Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, is joined on this episode by Garnet Chan, the Bren Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and among the most cited computational chemists in the world (34,000+ Google Scholar citations). Garnet is neither a quantum computing booster nor a dismissive skeptic. He's a theorist who works at the exact boundary between what classical algorithms can and cannot do — and who keeps finding that boundary further out than the quantum computing community has claimed. The FeMo-cofactor has been a flagship quantum computing use case for nearly a decade: a catalytic core of the enzyme that fixes atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, and a molecule widely described as "beyond classical reach." Chan's January 2026 paper challenges that framing directly. This conversation explains what was actually solved, what wasn't, and what it would genuinely take for quantum computers to contribute to the chemistry of nitrogen fixation. This episode is for researchers, engineers, and informed observers who want an honest, technically grounded view of where quantum computers genuinely help in chemistry — and where classical methods are more capable than the field has admitted.
What You'll Learn
Why the FeMo-cofactor became one of the quantum computing community's favorite benchmark — and why the framing around energy savings from nitrogen fixation is less accurate than it sounds
What "chemical accuracy" (~1 kcal/mol) actually means as a precision target, and why hitting it classically undermines a decade of quantum resource estimates
Why real chemical systems are only "slightly entangled" — and what that means for the general argument that quantum computers are the natural tool for quantum chemistry
The difference between a problem being hard and a problem being exponentially hard — and why that distinction matters enormously for quantum advantage claims
Where the genuine classical wall might be: bridging 15 orders of magnitude in timescale to simulate an enzyme's full catalytic mechanism — and whether quantum computers have anything to say about that
Why Chan wrote a public blog post explaining his own paper — and what that reveals about the state of discourse in quantum chemistry and the quantum computing industry
The broader impact of quantum information science on chemistry — beyond hardware, the conceptual tools of quantum information have genuinely reshaped how chemists think about many-body states
What Chan is actually working toward: a full computational understanding of the nitrogenase reaction mechanism, using machine learning to bridge timescales classically — a decade-long journey he finds genuinely exciting
Resources & Links
The Central Paper & Commentary
Zhai et al. (2026) — "Classical Solution of the FeMo-Cofactor Model to Chemical Accuracy and Its Implications"arXiv:2601.04621 — The January 2026 preprint at the heart of this episode; the classical solution of the standard 76-orbital/152-qubit FeMo-co benchmark.
Chan — Quantum Frontiers Blog Post (March 2026)The FeMo-Cofactor and Classical and Quantum Computing — Chan's own accessible commentary on the paper, written in response to widespread misinterpretation; essential reading alongside the paper.
Key Papers for Context
Chan (2024) — "Spiers Memorial Lecture: Quantum Chemistry, Classical Heuristics, and Quantum Advantage"Faraday Discussions, 254, 11–52 — The formal theoretical framework behind Chan's thinking, including the "classical heuristic cost conjecture"; the deep-dive companion to this episode.
Lee et al. (2023) — "Evaluating the Evidence for Exponential Quantum Advantage in Ground-State Quantum Chemistry"Nature Communications — Chan group's landmark 2023 paper concluding that evidence for exponential quantum advantage across chemical space has yet to be found.
Begušić & Chan (2023/2024) — "Fast Classical Simulation of Evidence for the Utility of Quantum Computing Before Fault Tolerance"Science Advances — The paper showing classical simulation on a single laptop core could reproduce and exceed IBM's 127-qubit "utility" experiment.
Bauer, Bravyi, Motta & Chan (2020) — "Quantum Algorithms for Quantum Chemistry and Quantum Materials Science"arXiv:2001.03685 — A balanced review by Chan and colleagues showing he takes quantum algorithms seriously; useful counterpoint to the skeptical framing.
Babbush et al. (2025) — "The Grand Challenge of Quantum Applications"arXiv:2511.09124 — Google Quantum AI's direct engagement with Chan's skeptical position; argues polynomial speedups may still be practically decisive.
Computational Chemistry Highlights — Review of FeMo-co Papercompchemhighlights.org — Third-party commentary from Jan Jensen (University of Copenhagen).
Tools & Software
PySCF — Python-based Simulations of Chemistry Frameworkhttps://pyscf.org — The open-source quantum chemistry package co-stewarded by Chan's group; widely used for electronic structure calculations.
BLOCK — DMRG and Matrix Product State Algorithmshttps://github.com/sanshar/Block — Chan group's open-source implementation of density matrix renormalization group methods; the tensor network engine underlying much of this work.
Guest Links
Chan Lab at Caltechchan-lab.caltech.edu — Research group homepage with publications, software, and group members.
Google Scholar Profilescholar.google.com — 34,000+ citations across theoretical chemistry and condensed matter physics.
Caltech Science Exchange — Ask a Caltech Expert: Quantum Chemistryscienceexchange.caltech.edu — Accessible overview of Chan's perspective for a general science audience.
Key Quotes
"To a good approximation, you and I are not entangled. That's essentially how people think about molecules — atoms are distinct entities, and you can define each as a local entity because its properties are not intrinsically tied up with some other thing." — Garnet Chan, explaining why most chemical systems are cla...
Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat
17 Apr 2026
01:02:15
Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat
In this special live-streamed discussion, Will Zeng, co-founder of the Unitary Foundation, and Ziyaad Bhorat, VP at the Mozilla Foundation, join host Sebastian Hassinger to unpack their co-authored white paper, The Open Foundation Quantum Technology Needs. The paper argues that open source quantum software is structurally underfunded — too applied for academic grants, too public-good for venture capital — and that philanthropic organizations need to step in before the window closes.
This conversation arrives at a pivotal moment. Google recently published a paper showing Shor's algorithm could break ECDLP-256 with roughly 500,000 physical qubits — a 20x improvement over prior estimates — while Oratomic launched claiming 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits may be sufficient for cryptographically relevant computation. The timelines are compressing. The question is whether the software ecosystem can keep pace with the hardware. The video of our conversation can be viewed on YouTube.
What you'll learn
Why open source quantum software falls into a structural funding gap between academic grants and venture capital — and what that means for the field's trajectory
How Mozilla Foundation evaluates emerging technology fields for philanthropic intervention, and what specifically convinced them quantum was ripe for engagement
What Google's 20x efficiency gain for Shor's algorithm and the Oratomic launch mean for Q-Day timelines and post-quantum migration urgency
Why the "quantum Linux" analogy is useful but incomplete — and what the real risk is (fragmentation, not monopoly)
How Unitary Foundation's microgrant program ($4,000, six months) has become a faster on-ramp to quantum careers than traditional academic pathways
What PyMatching, PyZX, and other microgrant-funded projects reveal about the scalability of small open source investments
Why open source benchmarking through Metriq Gym matters — and why vendor-driven benchmarks can't fill this role
How the Qiskit team reductions at IBM illustrate the fragility of corporate-backed open source in quantum
What specific policy asks the quantum open source community has for the NQI reauthorization
The von Neumann vs. ENIAC lesson: why openness wins over secrecy in building transformative computing platforms
Will Zeng — President and co-founder of Unitary Foundation; Partner at Quantonation; DPhil in Quantum Information, University of Oxford
Ziyaad Bhorat — VP of Imagination and Strategic Growth, Mozilla Foundation; PhD in Political Science, UCLA
Key quotes
"Do we want a future where quantum computers are developed by secret government contractors with specialized PhDs who have top secret security clearances? Or do we want a future where quantum computers are built in the private sector, competing to provide economic value to everyone around the world?" — Will Zeng
"Do not be afraid to experiment. We're doing ourselves a disservice to be slow, especially in a space that really warrants experimentation." — Ziyaad Bhorat, on his message to philanthropic colleagues
"There's billions of people on the planet who want to do exciting and interesting things. Building quantum technology is one of those. If you have enough motivation, you just need to provide some on-ramps." — Will Zeng
"We should put forward an affirmative vision of what that future should look like and drive towards it — because otherwise it will be built in secret." — Ziyaad Bhorat
"The US spends 30, 35 billion on potato chips every year. There's a lot of room to grow." — Will Zeng, on the scale of quantum investment relative to what's needed
This episode is for anyone following the quantum utility debate or curious about how quantum computers will actually contribute to scientific discovery. Arnab Banerjee — assistant professor at Purdue, guest scientist at Oak Ridge's Quantum Science Center, and one of the most-cited experimentalists working at the intersection of quantum materials and quantum computing — walks us through his career-spanning journey from growing magnetic crystals to programming qubits.
You'll hear how Banerjee's frustration with classical tools that couldn't explain his own experimental data drove him to quantum computing, why a quantum spin liquid is like the vortex that forms when you throw a stone into water, and how his team used 50 qubits on IBM's Heron chip to reproduce the spectroscopic fingerprint of a real material — KCuF3 — matching data collected at Oak Ridge and the UK's ISIS neutron source. He also offers a nuanced assessment of where different quantum computing platforms excel, drawing on hands-on experience with IBM, QuEra, and D-Wave.
What you'll learn
What a quantum spin liquid actually is and why its collective behavior — like vortices on water — could enable naturally error-protected qubits
How neutron scattering works as a quantum probe — using the neutron's own spin and de Broglie wavelength to reveal both atomic positions and energy levels simultaneously
Why Banerjee's team chose to benchmark quantum simulation against known experimental data first before tackling classically intractable problems
What the IBM Heron benchmarking paper actually showed — reproducing spinon excitations in KCuF3, a one-dimensional Heisenberg chain, with quantitative agreement to neutron data
How different quantum computing modalities serve different materials science problems — IBM for fast, cheap operations on 2D lattices; trapped ions for all-to-all connectivity; D-Wave and QuEra for Ising-like Hamiltonians
How close we are to quantum advantage in materials simulation — Banerjee estimates 70-90 "good enough" qubits in 2D geometry could reach classically inaccessible regimes
Why Kitaev quantum spin liquids could provide a fundamentally different path to fault tolerance — topological protection from decoherence built into the material itself, not imposed through software
"The entire electronic industry is built around trying to avoid quantum effects as much as possible. This is the time when we need to make quantum our friend instead of our enemy."
"In a quantum spin liquid, the spin directions move collectively in dancing patterns that look extremely ordered — but if you take a snapshot, the individual spins feel completely random." — On why spin liquids are like vortices in water
"A spin is a qubit is a spin." — On why quantum magnets and quantum processors are fundamentally the same physics
"We need to know whether what we are doing really makes sense. That's what this experiment is about." — On why benchmarking against known results must come before tackling unsolved problems
"I would like to simulate the entire standard model using a quantum computer." — When asked what problem he'd throw at an unlimited quantum computer
Quantum Advantage Achieved with Dominik Hangleiter
01 Apr 2026
00:37:02
Has quantum advantage actually been achieved — or is the field still arguing over its own milestones? Dominik Hangleiter, one of the leading theorists working on quantum computational advantage, joins the podcast to make the case that it has, explain why so many physicists remain unconvinced, and map the path toward fault-tolerant, verifiable quantum advantage.
Why This Episode Matters
If you follow quantum computing and want to cut through the noise around quantum advantage claims, this episode is for you. Dominik Hangleiter — an Ambizione Fellow at ETH Zürich and postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley's Simons Institute — has spent over a decade studying the boundary between what quantum and classical computers can do. His March 2026 paper "Has quantum advantage been achieved?" synthesizes years of experiments, classical simulation attacks, and complexity theory into a clear-eyed assessment. Whether you're an experimentalist, a theorist, or simply quantum-curious, you'll come away with a sharper understanding of what's been demonstrated, what hasn't, and what comes next.
What You'll Learn
Why random circuit sampling became the primary arena for proving quantum advantage — and why the task's "uselessness" is a feature, not a bug
How the linear cross-entropy benchmark (XEB) works as a statistical proxy for verifying classically intractable quantum computation
Why audiences of physicists are still split on whether quantum advantage has been demonstrated, despite multiple experiments since 2019
What "peaked circuits" are and how they interpolate between random sampling and structured computation
How post-quantum cryptography (learning with errors) exploits problems that quantum computers can't solve — and what that reveals about quantum computation's limits
Why basic arithmetic is surprisingly hard for fault-tolerant quantum computers, and how that bottlenecks algorithms like Shor's
How fault-tolerant compilation co-designs quantum circuits with error-correcting codes to make advantage experiments scalable
The difference between "native" quantum operations and the overhead required for universal fault-tolerant computation
Why the interplay between quantum and classical computing strengths — not quantum dominance — may define the field's future
Scott Aaronson's reaction — Endorsement on Shtetl-Optimized: "quantum supremacy on contrived benchmark problems has almost certainly been achieved by now"
"Really what sets random circuit sampling apart is that it's really programmable. I give an input to the device, I design a circuit — I draw it randomly, yes — but then I give the circuit to the device, and whoever controls the device runs the circuit and gives me back the samples." — On why RCS qualifies as genuine computation
"We typically do in physics experiments a lot of extrapolation, a lot of circumstantial experiments that validate that the experiment you really care about is actually what you want to probe. And that's the sense in which I think these random circuit sampling experiments have been verified." — On the physics-style epistemology of quantum advantage
"Classical computers are really good at doing basic arithmetic, but quantum computers — it's really hard to do basic arithmetic. And that's for the reason that fault tolerance is very restrictive in terms of the operations that you can do on encoded information." — On the surprising asymmetry between quantum and classical capabilities
"I can't just tell the quantum computer to give me the outcome I want. There's rules to it. And how those rules apply to computational problems that we face in the real world beyond quantum simulation is, I think, a really intriguing challenge." — On the structured nature of quantum interference
"Maybe there's a world where we can stitch together different hardware systems and won't have a single platform that wins the race." — On heterogeneous quantum architectures
Related Episodes
Ep 35: Quantum Benchmarking with Jens Eisert — Hangleiter's PhD advisor discusses benchmarking quantum devices — essential context for understanding how we measure quantum performance.
Ep 74: Majorana qubits with Chetan Nayak — Another approach to fault tolerance with different native capabilities — relevant to Hangleiter's point about modality-specific strengths.
Calls to Action
Dominik's Quantum Frontiers blog series is one of the most accessible deep dives on quantum advantage available anywhere — start there if you want to explore beyond this conversation. Links in the show notes.
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Scaling Quantum Hardware Like Semiconductors with Matthijs Rijlaarsdam
23 Mar 2026
00:37:29
Scaling Quantum Hardware Like Semiconductors with Matthijs Rijlaarsdam
The quantum computing industry has been stuck at roughly 100 qubits for years — not because of physics, but because of wiring. Matthijs Rijlaarsdam, co-founder and CEO of QuantWare, explains how his company's 3D vertical chip architecture (VIO) could break through that ceiling to 10,000 qubits by 2028, and why the quantum industry needs to start thinking like the semiconductor industry if it wants to actually deliver on its promises.
Episode Summary
This conversation is for anyone trying to understand why quantum computers haven't scaled as fast as promised — and what it would take to change that. Matthijs brings an unusual perspective as a computer scientist (not a physicist) who co-founded QuantWare out of TU Delft's QuTech to become the world's first commercial supplier of superconducting quantum processors.
Rather than building a full quantum computer, QuantWare sells QPUs as components — the "TSMC of quantum." In this episode, Matthijs walks through the VIO architecture that routes signals vertically through stacked chiplets instead of along chip edges, why specialization and volume economics are the only realistic path to useful quantum computing, and how the Dutch quantum ecosystem punches far above its weight thanks to consistent long-term investment.
What You'll Learn
Why the quantum industry is stuck at ~100 qubits — and how 90% of current chip area is consumed by signal routing, not qubits, creating a fundamental scaling wall
How VIO's 3D chiplet architecture breaks the wiring bottleneck by routing signals vertically through stacked silicon modules, enabling 10,000-qubit processors that are physically smaller than today's 100-qubit chips
Why quantum computing will be heterogeneous — different platforms (superconducting, trapped ions, neutral atoms) have different trade-offs analogous to CPUs vs. memory vs. storage in classical computing
The economics that make specialization inevitable — why cable costs need to drop from EUR 1,500 per line to cents, and why volume manufacturing is the only way to get there
How QuantWare's three business models mirror the semiconductor industry — selling packaged QPUs (Intel model), foundry services (TSMC model), and packaging services for third-party chips
Why the Dutch quantum ecosystem succeeds — consistent decade-plus government investment in QuTech, EUR 600M+ to Quantum Delta NL, and the WENEC report recommending EUR 9.4 billion for quantum infrastructure
What "Quantum Open Architecture" means in practice — how making QPUs commercially available lowers barriers for the entire industry, similar to how standardized PC components enabled the computing revolution
QuantWare's roadmap: VIO-40K shipping in 2028 with up to 10,000 qubits, and a path to 1 million qubits using arrays of chiplet modules
Resources & Links
Company
QuantWare — world's first and largest commercial supplier of superconducting quantum processors
VIO Technology — QuantWare's 3D vertical integration and optimization architecture
QuTech — TU Delft quantum research institute where both QuantWare co-founders did their graduate work
Quantum Delta NL — Dutch national quantum technology program (EUR 600M+)
DARPA HARK program — Heterogeneous Accelerated Roadmap using Quantum Solutions; referenced by Matthijs as validation of the heterogeneous quantum computing thesis
Key Insights
"There is no path towards useful quantum computing without specialization. That is a total fantasy." — Matthijs Rijlaarsdam on why volume economics and the semiconductor model are inevitable for quantum
"The difference between EUR 1,500 and 10 cents per cable line — that's all volumes and yields." — on how manufacturing scale, not physics breakthroughs, will drive the next phase of quantum cost reduction
"If you look at it on a cost-per-qubit basis, VIO-40K at EUR 50 million is actually a 10x reduction from where we are today. Anyone claiming they'll do it for less is just not telling something realistic." — on the real economics of scaling quantum hardware
"Imagine if you were a company today and you wanted to do interesting stuff in AI, but you first had to develop a three nanometer process to make the chips. It would be completely ridiculous. And in quantum, that's what everyone is doing." — on why vertical integration won't survive at scale
"Good companies will get funded. We have in general not been restricted by access to capital ourselves." — on navigating European deep-tech venture capital
Ever wonder why quantum computing still feels like a "cool science experiment" instead of a deployable technology? After two decades building wireless standards and quantum systems at IBM, Brian Gaucher argues that engineering—not physics—has become the critical bottleneck holding back quantum technologies from real-world impact.
Why this episode matters
This conversation is essential for anyone trying to understand why quantum technologies haven't yet transitioned from laboratory demonstrations to scalable industrial applications. Brian co-authored the recent ERVA report that identifies the specific engineering challenges blocking quantum progress across computing, sensing, and biological applications. If you're a researcher, engineer, or technology leader wondering how quantum moves from promising science to transformational technology, this episode provides the roadmap.
The discussion reveals why materials engineering, not theoretical breakthroughs, will determine which nations lead the quantum economy—and why coordinated investment in nanoscale manufacturing infrastructure needs to happen now, before manufacturing ecosystems become geographically concentrated like semiconductors.
What you'll learn
How engineering precision has replaced theoretical understanding as the primary quantum bottleneck across computing, sensing, and biological applications
Why superconducting qubit fabrication still resembles lab experiments despite being labeled an "engineering problem" since 2016—and what's needed to achieve semiconductor-level reproducibility
The specific materials challenges blocking quantum scaling: surface and interface noise control, defect management, cryogenic packaging, and atomic-layer precision manufacturing
Why quantum computing will require hundreds of interconnected dilution refrigerators rather than single large systems, and the engineering implications of distributed quantum architectures
How AI and quantum computing create bidirectional acceleration opportunities: AI enabling quantum calibration and error mitigation, while quantum enhances optimization and molecular simulation workloads
Why quantum standards development faces a chicken-and-egg problem that won't resolve until reproducible quantum advantage is demonstrated—but must be ready immediately afterward
How regional quantum initiatives like Illinois Quantum Network and Elevate Quantum balance necessary specialization against harmful fragmentation in the pre-standards era
Why the semiconductor industry's offshore manufacturing migration offers critical lessons for maintaining quantum manufacturing leadership in the United States
qubitsok — Cut Noise. Work Quantum. The quantum computing job board and arXiv research digest built for the community.
Job seekers & researchers: Subscribe free at qubitsok.com — weekly job alerts + daily paper digest filtered by 400+ quantum tags.
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"Quantum advantages is going to come not just from better qubits alone, but really from better engineering. The physics is truly exciting in the discovery aspects, but that in itself is not going to go anywhere without a bigger picture wrapped around it."
"We understand the fundamental physics. What we need to do is get to reproducible, scalable fabrication and interface control remains one of the limiting things."
"Scientific leadership alone doesn't guarantee you long-term manufacturing leadership. We know this from semiconductors—the US remains strong in research and design, but manufacturing ecosystems went offshore."
"Once manufacturing ecosystems become geographically concentrated, you can't rebuild this stuff. So you need to address this earlier on and not wait."
"If we break encryption, every old email and text and bank statement that you've ever had becomes open. The enormity of such a risk should be driving someone crazy."
Quantum Engineering with David Reilly and Tom Ohki
09 Mar 2026
00:48:57
Revolutionary Quantum Engineering with David Reilly and Tom Ohki
Have you ever wondered what it takes to build computing systems that work at temperatures colder than outer space? David Reilly and Tom Ohki are tackling this exact challenge, leading a "special ops" team of engineers from their unique position at Emergence Quantum—the startup born from Microsoft's Station Q program. They're not just building quantum computers; they're creating the entire infrastructure ecosystem that will make scalable quantum computing possible.
Episode Summary
This episode explores how quantum computing's most challenging engineering problems are being solved from the ground up. David Reilly (former Station Q lead) and Tom Ohki (ex-Raytheon BBN Technologies) share their journey from academic research to building Emergence Quantum—a company focused on the systems-level challenges of quantum computing and beyond.
Unlike typical quantum startups racing to build better qubits, Emergence takes a "qubit-agnostic" approach, focusing on the critical control systems, cryogenic electronics, and infrastructure needed to scale any quantum platform. Their work spans from cryo-CMOS control systems that operate at millikelvin temperatures to revolutionary applications of cryogenic cooling in classical data centers.
What You'll Learn
How cryo-CMOS technology solves the fundamental wiring bottleneck that prevents quantum computers from scaling beyond hundreds of qubits
Why the "special ops" team model enables breakthrough engineering when tackling unprecedented technical challenges across quantum and classical computing
How cryogenic cooling could transform classical data centers by dramatically reducing power consumption and improving processor performance
The systems-level thinking required to build quantum computers that actually work at scale, beyond just improving individual qubit performance
Why Australia offers unique advantages for deep tech R&D companies focused on long-term hardware development rather than venture-driven growth
How quantum computing infrastructure development creates spillover benefits for classical computing, sensing, and other cryogenic applications
The historical parallels between today's quantum engineering challenges and the foundational R&D that built the internet and early computing systems
Why "qubit-agnostic" approaches to control systems provide more flexibility as quantum hardware continues evolving
qubitsok — Cut Noise. Work Quantum. The quantum computing job board and arXiv research digest built for the community.
Job seekers & researchers: Subscribe free at qubitsok.com — weekly job alerts + daily paper digest filtered by 400+ quantum tags.
Hiring managers: Post your quantum role and reach 500+ targeted subscribers. Use code NEWQUANTUMERA-50 for 50% off your first listing at qubitsok.com/post-job.
Technologies & Concepts
Cryo-CMOS: CMOS electronics operating at cryogenic temperatures
Dilution refrigerators: Ultra-low temperature cooling systems
Superconducting quantum devices and control systems
Key Insights
"We recognize that although quantum is very much moving into more traditional engineering domains, there's still so much fundamental research—you have to walk both paths. It will be both fundamental science and applied engineering, all at the same time." — David Reilly on the dual nature of quantum development
"Every member had this deep expertise, and we were able to progress in a flexible agile way. That was exactly the secret." — Tom Ohki on building high-performing technical teams
"You could ask the question: what are the attributes of scalable qubits, given the constraints of what you can build at the control layer?" — David Reilly on systems-level thinking
"If you don't believe in [scaling classical cryogenic computing], but you believe in quantum computing, there's some mismatch here—because the fundamental aspects are completely identical." — Tom Ohki on infrastructure requirements
"We're not trying to disrupt the incumbent technology. We're trying to improve it. But along the way, we're building the foundation for a world beyond that." — David Reilly on their strategic approach
Community & Next Steps
Ready to dive deeper into quantum systems engineering? Subscribe to New Quantum Era to catch every episode exploring the engineering breakthroughs that will define quantum computing's future.
Share this episode with colleagues working on complex technical systems—the insights on team dynamics and long-term R&D strategy apply far beyond quantum computing.
Join our community of quantum computing professionals, researchers, and technically curious minds who are shaping this field's development.
The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson
02 Mar 2026
00:39:48
From Steel Mills to Quantum Scale-Up: Inside Illinois's Bold Bet on the Future of Computing
What does it take to build the world's largest dedicated quantum technology park — on the site of a former steel mill? Harley Johnson is leading that effort, and the answer involves equal parts materials science, economic development, and a 30-year bet on quantum that's finally paying off.
Why This Episode Matters
If you're following the quantum computing industry's path from lab prototypes to commercial-scale systems, this episode maps the terrain. Harley Johnson — a computational materials scientist turned CEO of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) — explains how Illinois assembled a unique combination of federal research funding, state economic investment, national labs, and top-tier universities into a 128-acre technology park designed to solve the quantum industry's hardest problem: scaling up.
Whether you're a researcher, a founder, a policymaker, or someone trying to understand where quantum jobs and applications are actually headed, this conversation lays out how one state is building the infrastructure — physical, institutional, and human — to make large-scale quantum computing real.
What You'll Learn
How a 1994 bet on quantum mechanics in a mechanical engineering lab led to directing the largest dedicated quantum tech park in the world
Why Illinois chose a "beyond silicon" strategy for the CHIPS and Science Act — and how landing 4 of the first 10 federal quantum centers positioned the state for what came next
How IQMP's public-private governance model works: a university-governed LLC partnering with private developers, accountable to the public while incentivizing industry
Why the park deliberately hosts a diverse portfolio of hardware modalities — including PsiQuantum, IBM, Inflection, Dirac, and Pascal — and how that mirrors venture portfolio thinking
How IQMP's algorithm center connects quantum hardware companies with Fortune 500 end users in finance, insurance, energy, logistics, and pharma
What the DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative means for tenant selection and validation
Why roughly two-thirds of future quantum industry jobs may require a bachelor's degree or less — and what that means for workforce development on a former industrial site
How the Duality Accelerator, Chicago Quantum Exchange, and Polsky Center create a pipeline from early-stage startups to scale-up tenants
Why the convergence of physics, engineering, and computer science — all housed in one college at UIUC — is accelerating quantum's transition from science to engineering
Sponsor
qubitsok — Cut Noise. Work Quantum. The quantum computing job board and arXiv research digest built for the community. - Job seekers & researchers: Subscribe free at qubitsok.com — weekly job alerts + daily paper digest filtered by 400+ quantum tags. - Hiring managers: Post your quantum role and reach 500+ targeted subscribers. Use code NEWQUANTUMERA-50 for 50% off your first listing at qubitsok.com/post-job.
Resources & Links
Guest Links
Harley Johnson — Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering and Materials Science
NSF MRSEC at UIUC — Materials Research Science and Engineering Center focused on electronic and quantum materials
Policy & Funding
CHIPS and Science Act — federal legislation driving investment in semiconductor and quantum technology manufacturing in the US
Companies Mentioned
PsiQuantum — photonic quantum computing company scaling up at IQMP
IBM — anchor tenant at IQMP with longstanding partnership with UIUC
Key Quotes & Insights
"Help me pick a problem, a topic that is not big now, but would be big in 10 years." — Harley Johnson, on the question he asked his advisor in 1994 that launched his career in quantum materials
"When I heard my friends who are experimental physicists say, 'We know how to do it, now it's just an engineering problem,' I said great — now you've thrown down the gauntlet. Let the engineers at it."
"Something like two-thirds of the jobs that this industry will eventually create will require a bachelor's degree or less." — On workforce projections from Chicago Quantum Exchange research
"Our neighbors and community members are learning about quantum and thinking about how my grandson gets a job in quantum. Because my family, until now, we're steelworkers." — On the community impact of building a quantum park on a former US Steel site
"We're seeing a convergence of the great productive academic minds from computer science, engineering, and physics working now on the same problems. I'm not sure we saw that even five years ago."
Related Episodes
Alejandra Y. Castillo — Quantum as a Regional Economic Development Engine — Castillo, former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development, discusses how quantum technologies fit into federal and state economic strategy through the CHIPS and Science Act, EDA Tech Hubs, and inclusive workforce development. Essential context for understanding the policy and economic framework that IQMP operates within.
Martin Laforest — Building Quebec's Quantum Ecosystem — Laforest, partner at Quantacet and advisor to Canada's National Quantum Strategy, traces how Quebec built one of the world's strongest quantum ecosystems through decades of strategic investment — starting with a bet on condensed matter physics in the 1970s. A compelling parallel to the Illinois story and a window into how this pattern is playing out globally.
Nadya Mason — Quantum Leadership — Mason, the dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at University of Chicago, is a major force on the academic side of the Illinois quantum ecosystem, and has strong views on what's needed in terms of inclusion and education.
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Quantum LDPC error correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster
26 Feb 2026
00:37:36
Breaking Down RSA: How QLDPC Codes Cut Quantum Computing Requirements by an Order of Magnitude
What if I told you that the number of qubits needed to break RSA encryption just dropped from over a million to around 100,000? That's exactly what researchers at Iceberg Quantum achieved by combining quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) error correction with algorithmic optimizations—potentially accelerating quantum cryptography timelines by years.
Why this episode matters
This episode dives into groundbreaking research that could reshape quantum computing's practical timeline. We explore how QLDPC codes overcome the physical constraints of surface codes, why hardware diversity is driving new error correction approaches, and what this means for the race toward cryptographically relevant quantum computers.
Perfect for quantum researchers, cryptography professionals, and anyone curious about the engineering challenges between today's quantum devices and tomorrow's code-breaking machines.
What you'll learn
Why QLDPC codes outperform surface codes — How throwing out nearest-neighbor connectivity assumptions unlocks better physical-to-logical qubit ratios across multiple hardware platforms
The algorithmic tricks that matter — How shared register reads and parallelization techniques can dramatically reduce runtime on slower quantum hardware platforms like trapped ions and neutral atoms
What "hardware agnostic" really means — Why developing error correction methods that work across superconducting, trapped ion, photonic, and neutral atom platforms is crucial for the quantum ecosystem
How generalized ladder surgery enables logical operations — The breakthrough that made QLDPC codes viable for full quantum computation, not just quantum memory storage
Why decoding remains the bottleneck — The real-time classical computation challenges that still need solving to make fault-tolerant quantum computing practical
The business model emerging around quantum architecture — How companies like Iceberg are positioning themselves as the "ARM or Nvidia" of quantum computing through specialized fault-tolerant designs
What cryptographers should know now — Why the timeline for cryptographically relevant quantum computers may be compressing faster than expected, and why algorithmic improvements matter as much as hardware scaling
qubitsok — Cut Noise. Work Quantum. The quantum computing job board and arXiv research digest built for the community. - Job seekers & researchers: Subscribe free at qubitsok.com — weekly job alerts + daily paper digest filtered by 400+ quantum tags. - Hiring managers: Post your quantum role and reach 500+ targeted subscribers. Use code NEWQUANTUMERA-50 for 50% off your first listing at qubitsok.com/post-job.
Key insights & quotes
"We think this is an immensely fundamentally valuable thing to do — when hardware improvements and reduced resource requirements converge, we'll be able to do something useful." — Larry, Iceberg Quantum CSO
"It would probably be a big mistake to assume that the numbers are not going to keep going down" — on future resource requirement reductions for RSA breaking
"At every level of scaling, new challenges emerge — it's not just a matter of taking a zero off your number" — Paul Webster on why order-of-magnitude improvements translate to real timeline changes
"There's no obvious reason why something like the Pinnacle architecture wouldn't have an obvious impact once hardware companies reach hundreds of thousands of qubits" — on practical implementation timelines
"This is why it's so important to have this broader perspective and not be too dependent on the assumptions of one hardware platform" — on the value of hardware-agnostic approaches
Our Quantum Future with Evan Kubes
23 Feb 2026
00:38:06
How a Lawyer and a Listicle Launched One of Quantum's Most Influential Media Platforms
Evan Kubes had no physics degree, no engineering background, and no idea what a qubit was when he stumbled across a press release about AWS investing in quantum. What he did have was experience translating complex industries for mainstream audiences — and within months, he and co-founder Alex Challans had turned a Wix website and a "Top 20 Most Influential People in Quantum" listicle into The Quantum Insider, now one of the industry's leading media and intelligence platforms. In this episode, Evan shares how that scrappy start grew into Resonance, a multi-vertical deep tech media company — and why he spent the last year making Our Quantum Future, a feature-length documentary premiering at APS March Meeting that aims to bring quantum out of the echo chamber and onto your screen.
Why this episode matters
This episode marks a new chapter for The New Quantum Era. In the intro, Sebastian shares some big updates — going fully independent, new media projects including the Helgoland 2025 documentary, a newsletter, and broader efforts to build a more accessible and equitable quantum technology ecosystem through open source and open standards. He also announces his new role as a Fellow at the Unitary Foundation. Read the full blog post: A New Chapter.
The conversation with Evan Kubes is a perfect fit for this moment. Evan sits at the intersection of quantum's technical community and the broader world trying to make sense of it — a translator between physicists and the public. His story illuminates something the industry rarely discusses: how do you actually build awareness, trust, and market understanding for a technology most people can't explain?
The documentary Our Quantum Future, produced for the International Year of Quantum and featuring Nobel laureates, a former CIA officer, and the leaders of Google, Microsoft, and IonQ, is designed for exactly that audience — the curious non-specialist who wants to understand what quantum means for the world. The ethics and national security themes it surfaces are relevant well beyond the quantum community.
What you'll learn
How The Quantum Insider went from zero readers to a leading quantum industry platform using a creative "vanity listicle" strategy that got CEOs to respond overnight
Why a lawyer from the esports world saw the same market opportunity in quantum that venture capitalists were pouring billions into — and what that says about the accessibility gap in deep tech
How the Resonance media model applies The Quantum Insider playbook to space, AI, and climate tech — and what makes a deep tech vertical ripe for this approach
What 39 interviews across 40 countries revealed about how the quantum community thinks about ethics — including a striking divide between engineers ("I'm just solving a hard problem") and policymakers ("we need safeguards now")
The Oppenheimer parallel: how the documentary draws a direct line between the atomic bomb's development and today's quantum technology, and why some builders don't think about consequences while others think about nothing else
A former CIA operative's reframing of quantum advantage as incremental compounding — 1% better per year for five years — and why that makes quantum feel much more real today than the "break all encryption" narrative suggests
Why academics and corporate leaders consistently disagree on quantum's timeline, and where Evan lands after a year of filming both camps
Resources & links
Guest links
The Quantum Insider — Quantum industry media, intelligence, and data platform co-founded by Evan
Resonance — Parent company extending the deep tech media model to space, AI, climate tech [link to confirm]
Our Quantum Future — Documentary website with sign-up for distribution updates
People mentioned in the episode
Alex Challans — Co-founder and CEO of The Quantum Insider; Evan's business partner
Nicholas Ogler — Former CIA operative featured in the documentary; redefines quantum advantage from a national security lens
Dr. Bill Phillips — Nobel Prize-winning physicist; discusses his bet with Carl Williams on the quantum advantage timeline
Dr. John Doyle — Professor of quantum at Harvard, president of APS; draws the Oppenheimer parallel
Ilyas Khan — Former CEO of Quantinuum; argues for educational licensing frameworks around quantum technology
Eric Cornell — Nobel Prize winner featured in the documentary
Mentioned in the intro
A New Chapter — NQE blog post — Sebastian's full announcement on going independent, new projects, and the future of the podcast
Unitary Foundation — Open-source quantum technology ecosystem; Sebastian is now a Fellow
Key quotes & insights
"When Oppenheimer and the most brilliant minds in the world were developing the atom, you had a large group who didn't really understand what they were building — they were just trying to solve a very difficult engineering and physics problem. We posed that same question to engineers at Google today: do you ever think about the potential consequences of what you're building? They said, absolutely not.""Quantum advantage to me is simply: if I can do a certain task 1% better every single year for five years, that compounds quite heavily. A country that uses quantum to improve radar detection by half a percent per year for five years has a massive advantage." — Nicholas Agler, former CIA"We emailed 20 people in the quantum industry — CEOs of Microsoft, Google, IonQ, Atom Computing — and said: Congratulations, you made The Quantum Insider's list of the top 20 most influential people in quantum. Every single person responded and agreed to do an interview.""For any industry to succeed, you've gotta get the venture capitalists and the capital markets around it, and you've gotta get the end users excited. If it's only PhDs talking to each other, it's gonna be a very limited market.""This documentary was not made for the quantum industry. It was made for Joe Blow and Cindy Blow at home who've never heard of this industry — to elevate and highlight all this fascinating work that we're doing."
Sponsor
qubitsok — Cut Noise. Work Quantum. The quantum computing job board and arXiv research digest built for the community. - Job seekers & researchers: Subscribe free at qubitsok.com — weekly job alerts + daily paper digest filtered by 400+ quantum tags. - Hiring managers: Post your quantum role and reach 500+ targeted subscribers. Use code NEWQUANTUMERA-50 for 50% off your first listing at qubitsok.com/post-job.
Join the conversation
See the film: Visit ourquantumfuture.com to sign up for distribution updates — the premiere is at APS March Meeting in Boulder, with broader release to follow.
Read the blog ...
Building a Quantum Ecosystem from Scratch with Martin Laforest
17 Feb 2026
00:42:29
What does it take to build a thriving quantum ecosystem from the ground up? Martin Laforest, physicist-turned-venture-capitalist at Quantacet, reveals how Quebec transformed a 1970s academic bet into a $400M quantum powerhouse—and why the industry's biggest misconception is thinking quantum computing is either a science problem or an engineering problem when it's clearly both.
Summary In this conversation, Sebastian sits down with Martin Laforest, partner at Quantacet, Canada's quantum-only VC fund, to explore the messy realities of building quantum companies and ecosystems. Martin brings a rare perspective: PhD from Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing, eight years leading scientific outreach, a stint building a post-quantum cryptography startup with ex-BlackBerry executives, and now investing in the quantum future.
This episode is for anyone trying to understand how quantum technology actually gets built—not the hype, but the infrastructure, the collaboration models, the government investment strategies, and the patience required. Whether you're technical or just curious about how transformative technologies emerge, Martin offers a grounded view of what's working, what's not, and why the quantum revolution looks more like slow, deliberate ecosystem building than overnight breakthroughs.
What You'll Learn
Why quantum is both a science and engineering challenge and how the vacuum tube-to-transistor transition illuminates today's quantum journey
How Quebec built a world-class quantum ecosystem starting from a 1970s university bet on condensed matter physics through to today's $400M provincial investment
The infrastructure that matters: why Sherbrooke's six shared dilution fridges and quantum communication testbed represent a different collaboration model
What VCs actually look for in quantum startups beyond the technology—and why Martin believes early-stage investing is about building great companies, not just returns
The three most dangerous misconceptions plaguing quantum technology (spoiler: it's not just about quantum computers)
How regional quantum ecosystems should compete and collaborate with lessons from Netherlands, Chicago, and UK programs
Why fundamental research funding can't stop even as commercialization accelerates—and what happens when governments don't understand this balance
What "mutualized infrastructure" means in practice and why no single entity owning critical testbeds might be the secret sauce
How federal and provincial politics shape quantum strategy in Canada and what other countries can learn from it
On the science vs. engineering debate: "People ask if quantum computing is still a science problem or just engineering. It's both. Look at the vacuum tube to transistor transition—we needed new physics and new engineering. That's exactly where we are now."
On ecosystem building: "Sherbrooke made a bet on condensed matter physics in the 1970s. Fifty years later, they have six dilution fridges available for rent and a quantum communication testbed owned by no one. That infrastructure patience is what builds real ecosystems."
On VC philosophy: "Early-stage venture capital is about building great companies. The money is a byproduct. If you focus on the returns first, you'll make the wrong decisions every time."
On common misconceptions: "The biggest myth is that quantum technology equals quantum computing. We have quantum sensors, quantum communications, post-quantum crypto—this is a multi-faceted industry, not a single magic box."
On balancing research and commercialization: "You can't stop funding fundamental research just because commercialization is happening. The vacuum tube didn't kill physics research. We need both engines running or the whole thing stalls."
Join the Conversation
Subscribe to The New Quantum Era wherever you get your podcasts to hear more conversations with the people building quantum technology's future.
Quantum consciousness with Joachim Keppler
09 Feb 2026
00:36:35
What if consciousness isn’t generated by the brain, but emerges from its interaction with a ubiquitous quantum field? In this episode, Sebastian Hassinger and theoretical physicist Joachim Keppler explore a zero‑point field model of consciousness that could reshape both neuroscience and quantum theory.
Summary This conversation is for anyone curious about the “hard problem” of consciousness, quantum brain theories, and the future of quantum biology and AI. Joachim shares his QED‑based framework where the brain couples to the electromagnetic zero‑point field via glutamate, producing macroscopic quantum effects that correlate with conscious states. You’ll hear how this model connects existing neurophysiology, testable predictions, and deep questions in philosophy of mind.
What You’ll Learn
How a quantum field theorist ended up founding an institute for the scientific study of consciousness and building a rigorous, physics‑grounded framework for it.
Why consciousness may hinge on a universal principle: the brain’s resonant coupling to the electromagnetic zero‑point field, not just classical neural firing.
What macroscopic quantum phenomena in the brain look like, including coherence domains, self‑organized criticality, and long‑range synchronized activity patterns linked to conscious states.
How glutamate, the brain’s most abundant neurotransmitter, could act as the molecular interface to the zero‑point field inside cortical microcolumns.
Which concrete experiments could confirm or falsify this theory, from detecting macroscopic quantum coherence in neurotransmitter molecules to measuring glutamate‑driven biophoton emissions with a specific quantum “fingerprint.”
Why Joachim sees the zero‑point field as a dual‑aspect “psychophysical” field and how that reframes classic philosophy‑of‑mind debates about qualia and the nature of awareness.
What this perspective implies for artificial consciousness and whether future quantum computers or engineered systems might couple to the field and become genuinely conscious rather than merely simulating it.
How quantum biology could offer an evolutionary path for consciousness, extending field‑coupling ideas from the human brain down to simpler organisms and bacterial signaling.
“The brain may not produce consciousness; it may tune into it by coupling to the zero‑point field, like a resonant oscillator accessing a universal substrate of awareness.”
“Conscious states correspond to macroscopic quantum patterns in the brain—highly synchronized, near‑critical dynamics that disappear when the field coupling breaks down in unconsciousness.”
“Glutamate‑rich cortical microcolumns could be the molecular gateway to the zero‑point field, forming coherence domains that orchestrate neuronal firing from the bottom up.”
“If we can engineer systems that replicate this field‑coupling mechanism, we might not just simulate consciousness—we might be building genuinely conscious artificial systems.”
“Quantum biology could reveal an evolutionary continuum of field‑coupling, from simple organisms to humans, reframing how we think about life, intelligence, and mind.”
Quantum Leadership with Nadya Mason
02 Feb 2026
00:45:48
What happens when a former elite gymnast with “weak math and science” becomes dean of one of the world’s most influential quantum engineering schools? In this episode of *The New Quantum Era*, Sebastian Hassinger talks with Prof. Nadya Mason about quantum 2.0, building a regional quantum ecosystem, and why she sees leadership as a way to serve and build community rather than accumulate power.
Summary This conversation is for anyone curious about how quantum materials research, academic leadership, and large‑scale public investment are shaping the next phase of quantum technology. You’ll hear how Nadya’s path from AT&T Bell Labs to dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at UChicago informs her service‑oriented approach to leadership and ecosystem building. The discussion spans superconducting devices, Chicago’s quantum hub strategy, and what it will actually take to build a diverse, job‑ready quantum workforce in time for the coming wave of applications.
What You’ll Learn
How a non‑linear path (elite sports, catching up in math, early lab work) can lead to a career at the center of quantum science and engineering.
Why condensed matter and quantum materials are the quiet “bottleneck” for scalable quantum computing, networking, and transduction technologies.
How superconducting junctions, Andreev bound states, and hybrid devices underpin today’s superconducting qubits and topological quantum efforts.
The difference between “quantum 1.0” (lasers, GPS, nuclear power, semiconductors) and “quantum 2.0” focused on sensing, communication, and computation.
How the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Chicago Quantum Exchange are deliberately knitting together universities, national labs, industry, and state funding into a cohesive quantum cluster.
Why Nadya frames leadership as building communities around science and opportunity, and what that means in a faculty‑driven environment where “nobody works for the dean.”
Concrete ways Illinois and UChicago are approaching quantum education and workforce development, from REUs and the Open Quantum Initiative to the South Side Science Fair.
Why early math confidence plus hands‑on research experience are the two most important ingredients for preparing the next generation of quantum problem‑solvers.
Resources & Links
Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago – Nadya’s home institution, pioneering an interdisciplinary, theme‑based approach to quantum, materials for sustainability, and immunoengineering.
Chicago Quantum Exchange – Regional hub connecting universities, national labs, and industry to build quantum networks, workforce, and commercialization pathways.
South Side Science Fair (UChicago) – Large‑scale outreach effort bringing thousands of local students to campus to encounter science and quantum concepts early.
Key Quotes or Insights
“A rainbow is more beautiful because I understand the fraction behind it”—how physics deepened Nadya’s sense of wonder rather than reducing it.
“In condensed matter, the devil is in the material—and the interfaces”—why microscopic imperfections and humidity‑induced “schmutz” can make or break quantum devices.
“Quantum 1.0 gave us lasers, GPS, and nuclear power; quantum 2.0 is about using quantum systems to *process* information through sensing, networking, and computing.”
“If you want to accumulate power, academia is not the place—faculty don’t work for me. Leadership here is about building community and creating opportunities.”
“If we want to lead in quantum as a country, we have to make math skills and real lab experiences accessible early, so kids even know this world exists as an option.”
Calls to Action
Subscribe to The New Quantum Era and share this episode with a colleague or student who’s curious about quantum careers and leadership beyond the usual narratives.
If you’re an educator or program lead, explore ways to bring hands‑on research experiences and accessible math support into your classroom or community programs.
If you’re in industry, academia, or policy, consider how you or your organization can plug into regional quantum ecosystems like Chicago’s to support training, internships, and inclusive hiring.
Democratizing Quantum Venture Investing with Chris Sklarin
26 Jan 2026
00:33:23
Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, talks with Alumni Ventures managing partner Chris Sklarin about how one of the most active US venture firms is building a quantum portfolio while “democratizing” access to VC as an asset class for individual investors. They dig into Alumni Ventures’ co‑investor model, how the firm thinks about quantum hardware, software, and sensing, and why quantum should be viewed as a long‑term platform with near‑term pockets of commercial value. Chris also explains how accredited investors can start seeing quantum deal flow through Alumni Ventures’ syndicate.
Chris’ background and Alumni Ventures in a nutshell
Chris is an MIT‑trained engineer who spent years in software startups before moving into venture more than 20 years ago.
Alumni Ventures is a roughly decade‑old firm focused on “democratizing venture capital” for individual investors, with over 11,000 LPs, more than 1.5 billion dollars raised, and about 1,300 active portfolio companies.
The firm has been repeatedly recognized as a highly active VC by CB Insights, PitchBook, Stanford GSB, and Time magazine.
How Alumni Ventures structures access for individuals
Most investors come in as individuals into LLC‑structured funds rather than traditional GP/LP funds.
Alumni Ventures always co‑invests alongside a lead VC, using the lead’s conviction, sector expertise, and diligence as a key signal.
The platform also offers a syndicate where accredited investors can opt in to see and back individual deals, including those tagged for quantum.
Quantum in the Alumni Ventures portfolio
Alumni Ventures has 5–6 quantum‑related investments spanning hardware, software, and applications, including Rigetti, Atom Computing, Q‑CTRL, Classiq, and quantum‑error‑mitigation startup Qedma/Cadmus.
Rigetti was one of the firm’s earliest quantum investments; the team followed on across multiple rounds and was able to return capital to investors after Rigetti’s SPAC and a strong period in the public markets.
Chris also highlights interest in Cycle Dre (a new company from Rigetti’s former CTO) and application‑layer companies like InQ and quantum sensing players.
Barbell funding and the “3–5 year” view
Chris responds to the now‑familiar “barbell” funding picture in quantum— a few heavily funded players and a long tail of small companies—by emphasizing near‑term revenue over pure science experiments.
He sees quantum entering an era where companies must show real products, customers, and revenue, not just qubit counts.
Over the next 3–5 years, he expects meaningful commercial traction first in areas like quantum sensing, navigation, and point solutions in chemistry and materials, with full‑blown fault‑tolerant systems further out.
Hybrid compute and NVIDIA’s signal to the market
Chris points to Jensen Huang’s GTC 2025 keynote slide on NVIDIA’s hybrid quantum–GPU ecosystem, where Alumni Ventures portfolio companies such as Atom Computing, Classiq, and Rigetti appeared.
He notes that NVIDIA will not put “science projects” on that slide—those partnerships reflect a view that quantum processors will sit tightly coupled next to GPUs to handle specific workloads.
He also mentions a large commercial deal between NVIDIA and Groq (a classical AI chip company in his portfolio) as another sign of a more heterogeneous compute future that quantum will plug into.
Where near‑term quantum revenue shows up
Chris expects early commercial wins in sensing, GPS‑denied navigation, and other narrow but valuable applications before broad “quantum advantage” in general‑purpose computing.
Software and middleware players can generate revenue sooner by making today’s hardware more stable, more efficient, or easier to program, and by integrating into classical and AI workflows.
He stresses that investors love clear revenue paths that fit into the 10‑year life of a typical venture fund.
University spin‑outs, clustering, and deal flow
Alumni Ventures certainly sees clustering around strong quantum schools like MIT, Harvard, and Yale, but Chris emphasizes that the “alumni angle” is secondary to the quality of the venture deal.
Mature tech‑transfer offices and standard Delaware C‑corps mean spinning out quantum IP from universities is now a well‑trodden path.
Chris leans heavily on network effects—Alumni Ventures’ 800,000‑person network and 1,300‑company CEO base—as a key channel for discovering the most interesting quantum startups.
Managing risk in a 100‑hardware‑company world
With dozens of hardware approaches now in play, Chris uses Alumni Ventures’ co‑investor model and lead‑investor diligence as a filter rather than picking purely on physics bets.
He looks for teams with credible near‑term commercial pathways and for mechanisms like sensing or middleware that can create value even if fault‑tolerant systems arrive later than hoped.
He compares quantum to past enabling waves like nanotech, where the biggest impact often shows up as incremental improvements rather than a single “big bang” moment.
Democratizing access to quantum venture
Alumni Ventures allows accredited investors to join its free syndicate, self‑attest accreditation, and then see deal materials—watermarked and under NDA—for individual investments, including quantum.
Chris encourages people to think in terms of diversified funds (20–30 deals per fund year) rather than only picking single names in what is a power‑law asset class.
He frames quantum as a long‑duration infrastructure play with near‑term pockets of usefulness, where venture can help investors participate in the upside without getting ahead of reality.
Regional quantum development with Alejandra Y. Castillo
19 Jan 2026
00:32:19
Alejandra Y. Castillo, former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development and now Chancellor Senior Fellow for Economic Development at Purdue University Northwest, joins your host, Sebastian Hassinger, to discuss how quantum technologies can drive inclusive regional economic growth and workforce development. She shares lessons from federal policy, Midwest tech hubs, and cross-state coalitions working to turn quantum from lab research into broad-based opportunity.
Themes and key insights
Quantum as near-term and multi-faceted: Castillo pushes back on the idea that quantum is distant, emphasizing that computing, sensing, and communications are already maturing and attracting serious investment from traditional industries like biopharma.
From federal de-risking to regional ecosystems: She describes the federal role as de-risking early innovation through programs under the CHIPS and Science Act while stressing that long-term success depends on regional coalitions across states, universities, industry, philanthropy, and local government.
Inclusive workforce and supply-chain planning: Castillo argues that “quantum workforce” must go beyond PhDs to include a mapped ecosystem of jobs, skills, suppliers, housing, and infrastructure so that local communities see quantum as opportunity, not displacement.
National security, urgency, and inclusion: She frames sustained quantum investment as both an economic and national security imperative, warning that inconsistent U.S. funding risks falling behind foreign competitors while also noting that private capital alone may ignore inclusion and regional equity.
Notable quotes
“We either focus on the urgency or we’re going to have to focus on the emergency.”
“No one state is going to do this… This is a regional play that we will be called to answer for the sake of a national security play as well.”
“We want to make sure that entire regions can actually reposition themselves from an economic perspective, so that people can stay in the places they call home—now we’re talking about quantum.”
“Are we going to make that same mistake again, or should we start to think about and plan how quantum is going to also impact us?”
CHIPS and Science Act (formerly “Endless Frontier”) — U.S. legislation that authorized large-scale funding for semiconductors and science, enabling EDA’s Tech Hubs and NSF’s Engines programs to back regional coalitions in emerging technologies like quantum.
EDA Tech Hubs and NSF Engines programs — Federal initiatives that fund multi-state consortiums combining universities, companies, and civic organizations to build durable regional innovation ecosystems, including quantum-focused hubs in the Midwest.
National Quantum Algorithms Center — This center explores quantum algorithms for real-world problems such as natural disasters and biopharma discovery, aiming to connect quantum advances directly to societal challenges.
Roberts Impact Lab at Purdue Northwest (with Quantum Corridor) – A testbed and workforce development center focused on quantum, AI, and post-quantum cryptography, designed to prepare local talent and companies for quantum-era applications.
Chicago Quantum Exchange and regional partners (Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin) – A multi-university and multi-state collaboration that pioneered a model for regional quantum ecosystems.
Majorana qubits with Chetan Nayak
12 Jan 2026
01:03:26
In this episode of The New Quantum Era, your host Sebastian Hassinger is joined by Chetan Nayak, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, professor of physics at the University of California Santa Barbara, and driving force behind Microsoft's quantum hardware R&D program. They discuss a modality of qubit that has not been covered on the podcast before, based on Majorana fermonic behaviors, which have the promise of providing topological protection against the errors which are such a challenge to quantum computing.
Guest Bio
Chetan Nayak is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and leads the company’s topological quantum hardware program, including the Majorana‑1 processor based on Majorana‑zero‑mode qubits.
He is also a professor of physics at UCSB and a leading theorist in topological phases of matter, non‑Abelian anyons, and topological quantum computation.
Chetan co‑founded Microsoft’s Station Q in 2005, building a bridge from theoretical proposals for topological qubits to engineered semiconductor–superconductor devices.
What we talk about
Chetan’s first exposure to quantum computing in Peter Shor’s lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study, and how that intersected with his PhD work with Frank Wilczek on non‑Abelian topological phases and Majorana zero modes.
The early days of topological quantum computation: fractional quantum Hall states at , emergent quasiparticles, and the realization that braiding these excitations naturally implements Clifford gates.
How Alexei Kitaev’s toric‑code and Majorana‑chain ideas connected abstract topology to concrete condensed‑matter systems, and led to Chetan’s collaboration with Michael Freedman and Sankar Das Sarma.
The 2005 proposal for a gallium‑arsenide quantum Hall device realizing a topological qubit, and the founding of Station Q to turn such theoretical blueprints into experimental devices in partnership with academic labs.
Why Microsoft pivoted from quantum Hall platforms to semiconductor–superconductor nanowires: leveraging the Fu–Kane proximity effect, spin–orbit‑coupled semiconductors, and a huge material design space—while wrestling with the challenges of interfaces and integration.
The evolution of the tetron architecture: two parallel topological nanowires with four Majorana zero modes, connected by a trivial superconducting wire and coupled to quantum dots that enable native Z‑ and X‑parity loop measurements.
How topological superconductivity allows a superconducting island to host even or odd total electron parity without a local signature, and why that nonlocal encoding provides hardware‑level protection for the qubit’s logical 0 and 1.
Microsoft’s roadmap in a 2D “quality vs. complexity” space: improving topological gap, readout signal‑to‑noise, and measurement fidelity while scaling from single tetrons to error‑corrected logical qubits and, ultimately, utility‑scale systems.
Error correction on top of topological qubits: using surface codes and Hastings–Haah Floquet codes with native two‑qubit parity measurements, and targeting hundreds of physical tetrons per logical qubit and thousands of logical qubits for applications like Shor’s algorithm and quantum chemistry.
Engineering for scale: digital, on–off control of quantum‑dot couplings; cryogenic CMOS to fan out control lines inside the fridge; and why tetron size and microsecond‑scale operations sit in a sweet spot for both physics and classical feedback.
Where things stand today: the Majorana‑1 chiplet, recent tetron loop‑measurement experiments, DARPA’s US2QC program, and how external users—starting with government and academic partners—will begin to access these devices before broader Azure Quantum integration.
Papers and resources mentioned These are representative papers and resources that align with topics and allusions in the conversation; they are good entry points if you want to go deeper.
In this episode of The New Quantum Era, Sebastian talks with Hrant Gharibyan, CEO and co‑founder of BlueQubit, about “peaked circuits” and the challenge of verifying quantum advantage. They unpack Scott Aaronson and Yuxuan Zhang’s original peaked‑circuit proposal, BlueQubit’s scalable implementation on real hardware, and a new public challenge that invites the community to attack their construction using the best classical algorithms available. Along the way, they explore how this line of work connects to cryptography, hardness assumptions, and the near‑term role of quantum devices as powerful scientific instruments.
Topics Covered
Why verifying quantum advantage is hard The core problem: if a quantum device claims to solve a task that is classi-cally intractable, how can anyone check that it did the right thing? Random circuit sampling (as in Google’s 2019 “supremacy” experiment and follow‑on work from Google and Quantinuum) is believed to be classically hard to simulate, but the verification metrics (like cross‑entropy benchmarking) are themselves classically intractable at scale.
What are peaked circuits? Aaronson and Zhang’s idea: construct circuits that look like random circuits in every respect, but whose output distribution secretly has one special bit string with an anomalously high probability (the “peak”). The designer knows the secret bit string, so a quantum device can be verified by checking that measurement statistics visibly reveal the peak in a modest number of shots, while finding that same peak classically should be as hard as simulating a random circuit.
BlueQubit’s scalable construction and hardware demo BlueQubit extended the original 24‑qubit, simulator‑based peaked‑circuit construction to much larger sizes using new classical protocols. Hrant explains their protocol for building peaked circuits on Quantinuum’s H2 processor with around 56 qubits, thousands of gates, and effectively all‑to‑all connectivity, while still hiding a single secret bit string that appears as a clear peak when run on the device.
Obfuscation tricks and “quantum steganography” The team uses multiple obfuscation layers (including “swap” and “sweeping” tricks) to transform simple peaked circuits into ones that are statistically indistinguishable from generic random circuits, yet still preserve the hidden peak.
The BlueQubit Quantum Advantage Challenge To stress‑test their hardness assumptions, BlueQubit has published concrete circuits and launched a public bounty (currently a quarter of a bitcoin) for anyone who can recover the secret bit string classically. The aim is to catalyze work on better classical simulation and de‑quantization techniques; either someone closes the gap (forcing the protocol to evolve) or the standing bounty helps establish public trust that the task really is classically infeasible.
Potential cryptographic angles Although the main focus is verification of quantum advantage, Hrant outlines how the construction has a cryptographic flavor: a secret bit string effectively acts as a key, and only a sufficiently powerful quantum device can efficiently “decrypt” it by revealing the peak. Variants of the protocol could, in principle, yield schemes that are classically secure but only decryptable by quantum hardware, and even quantum‑plus‑key secure, though this remains speculative and secondary to the verification use case.
From verification protocol to startup roadmap Hrant positions BlueQubit as an algorithm and capability company: deeply hardware‑aware, but focused on building and analyzing advantage‑style algorithms tailored to specific devices. The peaked‑circuit work is one pillar in a broader effort that includes near‑term scientific applications in condensed‑matter physics and materials (e.g., Fermi–Hubbard models and out‑of‑time‑ordered correlators) where quantum devices can already probe regimes beyond leading classical methods.
Scientific advantage today, commercial advantage tomorrow Sebastian and Hrant emphasize that the first durable quantum advantages are likely to appear in scientific computing—acting as exotic lab instruments for physicists, chemists, and materials scientists—well before mass‑market “killer apps” arrive. Once robust, verifiable scientific advantage is established, scaling to larger models and more complex systems becomes a question of engineering, with clear lines of sight to industrial impact in sectors like pharmaceuticals, advanced materials, and manufacturing.
Diamond vacancies and scalable qubits with Quantum Brilliance
06 Dec 2025
00:36:53
Episode overview This episode of The New Quantum Era features a conversation with Quantum Brilliance co‑founder and CEO Mark Luo and independent board chair Brian Wong about diamond nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers as a platform for both quantum computing and quantum sensing. The discussion covers how NV centers work, what makes diamond‑based qubits attractive at room temperature, and how to turn a lab technology into a scalable product and business.
What are diamond NV qubits? Mark explains how nitrogen vacancy centers in synthetic diamond act as stable room‑temperature qubits, with a nitrogen atom adjacent to a missing carbon atom creating a spin system that can be initialized and read out optically or electronically. The rigidity and thermal properties of diamond remove the need for cryogenics, complex laser setups, and vacuum systems, enabling compact, low‑power quantum devices that can be deployed in standard environments.
Quantum sensing to quantum computing NV centers are already enabling ultra‑sensitive sensing, from nanoscale MRI and quantum microscopy to magnetometry for GPS‑free navigation and neurotech applications using diamond chips under growing brain cells. Mark and Brian frame sensing not as a hedge but as a volume driver that builds the diamond supply chain, pushes costs down, and lays the manufacturing groundwork for future quantum computing chips.
Fabrication, scalability, and the value chain A key theme is the shift from early “shotgun” vacancy placement in diamond to a semiconductor‑style, wafer‑like process with high‑purity material, lithography, characterization, and yield engineering. Brian characterizes Quantum Brilliance’s strategy as “lab to fab”: deciding where to sit in the value chain, leveraging the existing semiconductor ecosystem, and building a partner network rather than owning everything from chips to compilers.
Devices, roadmaps, and hybrid nodes Quantum Brilliance has deployed room‑temperature systems with a handful of physical qubits at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Fraunhofer IAF, and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. Their roadmap targets application‑specific quantum computing with useful qubit counts toward the end of this decade, and lunchbox‑scale, fault‑tolerant systems with on the order of 50–60 logical qubits in the mid‑2030s.
Modality tradeoffs and business discipline Mark positions diamond NV qubits as mid‑range in both speed and coherence time compared with superconducting and trapped‑ion systems, with their differentiator being compute density, energy efficiency, and ease of deployment rather than raw gate speed. Brian brings four decades of experience in semiconductors, batteries, lidar, and optical networking to emphasize milestones, early revenue from sensing, and usability—arguing that making quantum devices easy to integrate and operate is as important as the underlying physics for attracting partners, customers, and investors.
Partners and ecosystem The episode underscores how collaborations with institutions such as Oak Ridge, Fraunhofer, and Pawsey, along with industrial and defense partners, help refine real‑world requirements and ensure the technology solves concrete problems rather than just hitting abstract benchmarks. By co‑designing with end users and complementary hardware and software vendors, Quantum Brilliance aims to “democratize” access to quantum devices, moving them from specialized cryogenic labs to desks, edge systems, and embedded platforms.
Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling with Nobel Laureate John Martinis
26 Nov 2025
00:49:26
Episode overview John Martinis, Nobel laureate and former head of Google’s quantum hardware effort, joins Sebastian Hassinger on The New Quantum Era to trace the arc of superconducting quantum circuits—from the first demonstrations of macroscopic quantum tunneling in the 1980s to today’s push for wafer-scale, manufacturable qubit processors. The episode weaves together the physics of “synthetic atoms” built from Josephson junctions, the engineering mindset needed to turn them into reliable computers, and what it will take for fabrication to unlock true large-scale quantum systems.
Guest bio John M. Martinis is a physicist whose experiments on superconducting circuits with John Clarke and Michel Devoret at UC Berkeley established that a macroscopic electrical circuit can exhibit quantum tunneling and discrete energy levels, work recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” He went on to lead the superconducting quantum computing effort at Google, where his team demonstrated large-scale, programmable transmon-based processors, and now heads Qolab (also referred to in the episode as CoLab), a startup focused on advanced fabrication and wafer-scale integration of superconducting qubits.
Martinis’s career sits at the intersection of precision instrumentation and systems engineering, drawing on a scientific “family tree” that runs from Cambridge through John Clarke’s group at Berkeley, with strong theoretical influence from Michel Devoret and deep exposure to ion-trap work by Dave Wineland and Chris Monroe at NIST. Today his work emphasizes solving the hardest fabrication and wiring challenges—pursuing high-yield, monolithic, wafer-scale quantum processors that can ultimately host tens of thousands of reproducible qubits on a single 300 mm wafer.
Key topics
Macroscopic quantum tunneling on a chip: How Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis used a current-biased Josephson junction to show that a macroscopic circuit variable obeys quantum mechanics, with microwave control revealing discrete energy levels and tunneling between states—laying the groundwork for superconducting qubits. The episode connects this early work directly to the Nobel committee’s citation and to today’s use of Josephson circuits as “synthetic atoms” for quantum computing.
From DC devices to microwave qubits: Why early Josephson devices were treated as low-frequency, DC elements, and how failed experiments pushed Martinis and collaborators to re-engineer their setups with careful microwave filtering, impedance control, and dilution refrigerators—turning noisy circuits into clean, quantized systems suitable for qubits. This shift to microwave control and readout becomes the through-line from macroscopic tunneling experiments to modern transmon qubits and multi-qubit gates.
Synthetic atoms vs natural atoms: The contrast between macroscopic “synthetic atoms” built from capacitors, inductors, and Josephson junctions and natural atomic systems used in ion-trap and neutral-atom experiments by groups such as Wineland and Monroe at NIST, where single-atom control made the quantum nature more obvious. The conversation highlights how both approaches converged on single-particle control, but with very different technological paths and community cultures.
Ten-year learning curve for devices: How roughly a decade of experiments on quantum noise, energy levels, and escape rates in superconducting devices built confidence that these circuits were “clean enough” to support serious qubit experiments, just as early demonstrations such as Yasunobu Nakamura’s single-Cooper-pair box showed clear two-level behavior. This foundational work set the stage for the modern era of superconducting quantum computing across academia and industry.
Surface code and systems thinking: Why Martinis immersed himself in the surface code, co-authoring a widely cited tutorial-style paper “Surface codes: Towards practical large-scale quantum computation” (Austin G. Fowler, Matteo Mariantoni, John M. Martinis, Andrew N. Cleland, Phys. Rev. A 86, 032324, 2012; arXiv:1208.0928), to translate error-correction theory into something experimentalists could build. He describes this as a turning point that reframed his work at UC Santa Barbara and Google around full-system design rather than isolated device physics.
Fabrication as the new frontier: Martinis argues that the physics of decent transmon-style qubits is now well understood and that the real bottleneck is industrial-grade fabrication and wiring, not inventing ever more qubit variants. His company’s roadmap targets wafer-scale integration—e.g., ~100-qubit test chips scaling toward ~20,000 qubits on a 300 mm wafer—with a focus on yield, junction reproducibility, and integrated escape wiring rather than current approaches that tile many 100-qubit dies into larger systems.
From lab racks of cables to true integrated circuits: The episode contrasts today’s dilution-refrigerator setups—dominated by bulky wiring and discrete microwave components—with the vision of a highly integrated superconducting “IC” where most of that wiring is brought on-chip. Martinis likens the current state to pre-IC TTL logic full of hand-wired boards and sees monolithic quantum chips as the necessary analog of CMOS integration for classical computing.
Venture timelines vs physics timelines: A candid discussion of the mismatch between typical three-to-five-year venture capital expectations and the multi-decade arc of foundational technologies like CMOS and, now, quantum computing. Martinis suggests that the most transformative work—such as radically improved junction fabrication—looks slow and uncompetitive in the short term but can yield step-change advantages once it matures.
Physics vs systems-engineering mindsets: How Martinis’s “instrumentation family tree” and exposure to both American “build first, then understand” and French “analyze first, then build” traditions shaped his approach, and how system engineering often pushes him to challenge ideas that don’t scale. He frames this dual mindset as both a superpower and a source of tension when working in large organizations used to more incremental science-driven projects.
Collaboration, competition, and pre-competitive science: Reflections on the early years when groups at Berkeley, Saclay, UCSB, NIST, and elsewhere shared results openly, pushing the field forward without cut-throat scooping, before activity moved into more corporate settings around 2010. Martinis emphasizes that many of the hardest scaling problems—especially in materials and fabrication—would benefit from deeper cross-organization collaboration, even as current business constraints limit what can be shared.
Papers and research discussed
“Energy-Level Quantization in the Zero-Voltage State of a Current-Biased Josephson Junction” – John M. Martinis, Michel H. Devoret, John Clarke, Physical Review Letters 55, 1543 (1985). First clear observation of quantized energy levels and macroscopic quantum tunneling in a Josephson circuit, forming a core part of the work recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. Link: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.55.1543
“Quantum Mechanics of a Macroscopic Variable: The Phase Difference of a Josephson Junction” – J. Clarke et al., Science 239, 992 (1988). Further development of macroscopic quantum tunneling and wave-packet dynamics in current-biased Josephson junctions, demonstrating that a circuit-scale degree of freedom behaves as a quantum variable. Link (PDF via Cleland group):
Trapped ions on the cloud with Thomas Monz from AQT
18 Nov 2025
00:35:53
Thomas Monz, CEO of AQT (Alpine Quantum Technologies), joins Sebastian Hassinger on The New Quantum Era to chart the evolution of ion-trap quantum computing — from the earliest breakthroughs in Innsbruck to the latest roll-outs in supercomputing centers and on the cloud. Drawing on a career that spans pioneering research and entrepreneurial grit, Thomas details how AQT is bridging the gap between academic innovation and practical, scalable systems for real-world users. The conversation traverses AQT’s trajectory from component supplier to systems integrator, how standard 19-inch racks and open APIs are making quantum computing accessible in Europe’s top HPC centers, what Thomas anticipates from AQT launching on Amazon Braket, a quantum computing service from AWS, and what it will take for quantum to deliver genuine economic value.
Guest Bio Thomas Monz is the CEO and co-founder of AQT. A physicist by training, his work has helped transform trapped-ion quantum computing from a fundamental research topic into a commercially viable technology. After formative stints in quantum networks, high-precision measurement, and hands-on engineering, Thomas launched AQT alongside Peter Zoller and Rainer Blatt to make robust, scalable quantum computers available far beyond the university lab. He continues to be deeply engaged in both hardware development and quantum error correction research, with AQT now deploying systems at EuroHPC centers and bringing devices to Amazon Braket.
Key Topics
From research prototype to rack-ready: How the pain points converting lab experiments into user-friendly hardware led AQT to build its quantum computers in the same form factors and standards as classical infrastructure, making plug-and-play integration with the supercomputing world possible.
Hybrid quantum–HPC deployments: Why systems-level thinking and classic IT lessons (such as respecting 19-inch rack and power standards) have enabled AQT to place ion-trap quantum computers in Germany and Poland as part of the EuroHPC initiative — and why abstraction at the API level is essential for developer adoption.
Error correction and code flexibility: How the physical properties of trapped ions let AQT remain agnostic to changing error-correcting codes (from repetition and surface codes to LDPC), enabling swift adaptation to new breakthroughs via software rather than expensive new hardware — and why end-users should never have to think about error correction themselves.
Scaling and networking: The challenges moving from one-dimensional to two-dimensional traps, the emerging role of integrated photonics, and AQT’s vision for interconnecting quantum computers within and across HPC sites using telecom-wavelength photons.
From local to cloud: What AQT’s move to Amazon Braket means for the range and sophistication of end-user applications, and how broad commercial access is shifting priorities from scientific exploration to real-world performance and customer-driven features.
Collaboration as leverage: How AQT’s open approach to integration—letting partners handle job scheduling, APIs, and orchestration—positions it as a technology supplier while benefiting from advances across Europe’s quantum ecosystem.
Why It Matters AQT’s journey illustrates how “physics-first” quantum innovation is finally crossing into scalable, reliable real-world systems. By prioritizing integration, user experience, and abstraction, AQT is closing the gap between experimental platforms and actionable quantum advantage. From better error rates and hybrid deployments to global cloud infrastructure, the work Thomas describes signals a maturing industry rapidly moving toward both commercial impact and new scientific discoveries.
Episode Highlights
How Thomas’s PhD work helped implement the first three-qubit ion-trap gates and formed the foundation for AQT’s technical strategy.
The pivotal insight: moving from bespoke lab systems to standardized products allowed quantum hardware to be deployed at scale.
The surprisingly smooth physical deployment of AQT machines across Europe, thanks to a “box-on-a-truck” design.
Real talk on error correction, the importance of LDPC codes, and the flexibility built into trapped-ion architectures.
The future of quantum networking: sending entangled photons between HPC facilities, and the promise of scalable cluster architectures.
What cloud access brings to the roadmap, including new end-user requirements and opportunities for innovation in error correction as a service.
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This episode offers an insider’s perspective on the tight coupling of science and engineering required to bring quantum computing out of the lab and into industry. Thomas’s journey is a case study in building both technology and market readiness — critical listening for anyone tracking the real-world ascent of quantum computers. In the spirit of full disclosure, Sebastian is an employee of AWS, working on quantum computing for the company, though he is not a member of the Braket service team.
Quantum Materials and Nano Fabrication with Javad Shabani
12 Nov 2025
00:33:32
Quantum Materials and Nano-Fabrication with Javad Shabani
Guest: Dr. Javad Shabani is Professor of Physics at NYU, where he directs both the Center for Quantum Information Physics and the NYU Quantum Institute. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2011, followed by postdoctoral research at Harvard and UC Santa Barbara in collaboration with Microsoft Research. His research focuses on novel states of matter at superconductor-semiconductor interfaces, mesoscopic physics in low-dimensional systems, and quantum device development. He is an expert in molecular beam epitaxy growth of hybrid quantum materials and has made pioneering contributions to understanding fractional quantum Hall states and topological superconductivity.
Episode Overview
Professor Javad Shabani shares his journey from electrical engineering to the frontiers of quantum materials research, discussing his pioneering work on semiconductor-superconductor hybrid systems, topological qubits, and the development of scalable quantum device fabrication techniques. The conversation explores his current work at NYU, including breakthrough research on germanium-based Josephson junctions and the launch of the NYU Quantum Institute.
Key Topics Discussed
Early Career and Quantum Journey Javad describes his unconventional path into quantum physics, beginning with a double major in electrical engineering and physics at Sharif University of Technology after discovering John Preskill's open quantum information textbook. His graduate work at Princeton focused on the quantum Hall effect, particularly investigating the enigmatic five-halves fractional quantum Hall state and its potential connection to non-abelian anyons.
From Spin Qubits to Topological Quantum Computing During his PhD, Javad worked with Jason Petta and Mansur Shayegan on early spin qubit experiments, experiencing firsthand the challenge of controlling single quantum dots. His postdoctoral work at Harvard with Charlie Marcus focused on scaling from one to two qubits, revealing the immense complexity of nanofabrication and materials science required for quantum control. This experience led him to topological superconductivity at UC Santa Barbara, where he collaborated with Microsoft Research on semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures.
Planar Josephson Junctions and Material Innovation At NYU, Javad's group developed planar two-dimensional Josephson junctions using indium arsenide semiconductors with aluminum superconductors, moving away from one-dimensional nanowires toward more scalable fabrication approaches. In 2018-2019, his team published groundbreaking results in Physical Review Letters showing signatures of topological phase transitions in these hybrid systems.
Gatemon Qubits and Hybrid Systems The conversation explores Javad's recent work on gatemon qubits—gate-tunable superconducting transmon qubits that leverage semiconductor properties for fast switching in the nanosecond regime. While indium arsenide's piezoelectric properties may limit qubit coherence, the material shows promise as a fast coupler between qubits. This research, published in Physical Review X, represents a convergence of superconducting circuit techniques with semiconductor physics.
Breakthrough in Germanium-Based Devices Javad reveals exciting forthcoming research accepted in Nature Nanotechnology on creating vertical Josephson junctions entirely from germanium. By doping germanium with gallium to make it superconducting, then alternating with undoped semiconducting germanium, his team has achieved wafer-scale fabrication of three-layer superconductor-semiconductor-superconductor junctions. This approach enables placing potentially 20 million junctions on a single wafer, opening pathways toward CMOS-compatible quantum device manufacturing.
NYU Quantum Institute and Regional Ecosystem The episode discusses the launch of the NYU Quantum Institute under Javad's leadership, designed to coordinate quantum research across physics, engineering, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science. The Institute aims to connect fundamental research with application-focused partners in finance, insurance, healthcare, and communications throughout New York City. Javad describes NYU's quantum networking project with five nodes across Manhattan and Brooklyn, leveraging NYU's distributed campus fiber infrastructure for short-distance quantum communication.
Academic Collaboration and the New York Quantum Ecosystem Javad explains how NYU collaborates with Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, RPI, Stevens Institute, and City College to build a Northeast quantum corridor. The annual New York Quantum Summit (now in its fourth year) brings together academics, government labs including AFRL and Brookhaven, consulting firms, and industry partners. This regional approach complements established hubs like the Chicago Quantum Exchange while addressing New York's unique strengths in finance and dense urban infrastructure.
Materials Science Challenges and Interfaces The conversation delves into fundamental materials science puzzles, particularly the asymmetric nature of material interfaces. Javad explains how material A may grow well on material B, but B cannot grow on A due to polar interface incompatibilities—a critical challenge for vertical device fabrication. He draws parallels to aluminum oxide Josephson junctions, where the bottom interface is crystalline but the top interface grows on amorphous oxide, potentially contributing to two-level system noise.
Industry Integration and Practical Applications Javad discusses NYU's connections to chip manufacturing through the CHIPS Act, linking academic research with 200-300mm wafer-scale operations at NY Creates. His group also participates in the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA) based at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Notable Quotes
"Behind every great experimentalist, there is a greater theorist."
"A lot of these kind of application things, the end users are basically in big cities, including New York...people who care at finance financial institutions, people like insurance, medical for sensing and communication."
"You don't wanna spend time on doing the exact same thing...but I do feel we need to be more and bigger."
Incubating quantum innovation with Vijoy Pandey of Outshift by Cisco
31 Oct 2025
00:39:40
Vijoy Pandey joins Sebastian Hassinger for this episode of The New Quantum Era to discuss Cisco's ambitious vision for quantum networking—not as a far-future technology, but as infrastructure that solves real problems today. Leading Outshift by Cisco, their incubation group and Cisco Research, Vijoy explains how quantum networks are closer than quantum computers, why distributed quantum computing is the path to scale, and how entanglement-based protocols can tackle immediate classical challenges in security, synchronization, and coordination. The conversation spans from Vijoy's origin story building a Hindi chatbot in the late 1980s to Cisco's groundbreaking room-temperature quantum entanglement chip developed with UC Santa Barbara, and explores use cases from high-frequency trading to telescope array synchronization.
Guest Bio Vijoy Pandey is Senior Vice President at Outshift by Cisco, the company's internal incubation group, where he also leads Cisco Research and Cisco Developer Relations (DevNet). His career in computing began in high school building AI chatbots, eventually leading him through distributed systems and software engineering roles including time at Google. At Cisco, Vijoy oversees a portfolio spanning quantum networking, security, observability, and emerging technologies, operating at the intersection of research and product incubation within the company's Chief Strategy Office.
Key Topics From research to systems: How Cisco's quantum work is transitioning from physics research to systems engineering, focusing on operability, deployment, and practical applications rather than building quantum computers. The distributed quantum computing vision: Cisco's North Star is building quantum network fabric that enables scale-out distributed quantum computing across heterogeneous QPU technologies (trapped ion, superconducting, etc.) within data centers and between them—making "the quantum network the solution" to quantum's scaling problem and classical computing's physics problem. Room-temperature entanglement chip: Cisco and UC Santa Barbara developed a prototype photonic chip that generates 200 million entangled photon pairs per second at room temperature, telecom wavelengths, and less than 1 milliwatt power—enabling deployment on existing fiber infrastructure without specialized equipment. Classical use cases today: How quantum networking protocols solve present-day problems in synchronization (global database clocks, telescope arrays), decision coordination (high-frequency trading across geographically distributed exchanges), and security (intrusion detection using entanglement collapse) without requiring massive qubit counts or cryogenic systems. Quantum telepathy for HFT: The concept of using entanglement and teleportation to coordinate decisions across locations faster than the speed of light allows classical communication—enabling fairness guarantees for high-frequency trading across data centers in different cities. Meeting customers where they are: Cisco's strategy to deploy quantum networking capabilities alongside existing classical infrastructure, supporting a spectrum from standard TLS to post-quantum cryptography to QKD, rather than requiring greenfield deployments. The transduction grand challenge: Why building the "NIC card" that connects quantum processors to quantum networks—the transducer—is the critical bottleneck for distributed quantum computing and the key technical risk Cisco is addressing. Product-company fit in corporate innovation: How Outshift operates like internal startups within Cisco, focusing on problems adjacent to the company's four pillars (networking, security, observability, collaboration) with both technology risk and market risk, while maintaining agility through a framework adapted from Cisco's acquisition integration playbook.
Why It Matters Cisco's systems-level approach to quantum networking represents a paradigm shift from viewing quantum as distant future technology to infrastructure deployable today for specific high-value use cases. By focusing on room-temperature, telecom-compatible entanglement sources and software stacks that integrate with existing networks, Cisco is positioning quantum networking as the bridge between classical and quantum computing worlds—potentially accelerating practical quantum applications from decades away to 5-10 years while solving immediate enterprise challenges in security and coordination.
Episode Highlights Vijoy's journey from building Hindi chatbots on a BBC Micro in the late 1980s to leading quantum innovation at Cisco. Why quantum networking is "here and now" while quantum computing is still being figured out. The spectrum of quantum network applications: from near-term classical coordination problems to the long-term quantum internet connecting quantum data centers and sensors. How entanglement enables provable intrusion detection on standard fiber networks alongside classical IP traffic. The "step function moment" coming for quantum: why the transition from physics to systems engineering means a ChatGPT-like breakthrough is imminent, and why this one will be harder to catch up on than software-based revolutions. Design partner collaborations with financial services, federal agencies, and energy companies on security and synchronization use cases. Cisco's quantum software stack prototypes: Quantum Compiler (for distributed quantum error correction), Quantum Alert (security), and QuantumSync (decision coordination)."
Nobel Laureate John Martinis Discusses Superconducting Qubits and Qolab
13 Oct 2025
00:37:05
This episode is a first for the show - a repeat of a previously posted interview on The New Quantum Era podcast! I think you'll agree the reason for the repeat is a great one - this episode, recorded at the APS Global Summit in March, features a conversation John Martinis, co-founder and CTO of QoLab and newly minted Nobel Laureate! Last week the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made an announcement that John would share the 2025 Nobel Prize for Physics with John Clarke and Michel Devoret “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” It should come as no surprise that John and I talked about macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in electrical circuits, since those are precisely the attributes that make a superconducting qubit work for computation.
The work John is doing at Qolab, a superconducting qubit company seeking to build a million qubit device, is really impressive, as befits a Nobel Laureate and a pioneer in the field. In our conversation we explore the strategic shifts, collaborative efforts, and technological innovations that are pushing the boundaries of quantum computing closer to building scalable, million-qubit systems.
Key Highlights
Emerging from Stealth Mode & Million-Qubit System Paper:
Discussion on QoLab’s transition from stealth mode and their comprehensive paper on building scalable million-qubit systems.
Focus on a systematic approach covering the entire stack.
Collaboration with Semiconductor Companies:
Unique business model emphasizing collaboration with semiconductor companies to leverage external expertise.
Comparison with bigger players like Google, who can fund the entire stack internally.
Innovative Technological Approaches:
Integration of wafer-scale technology and advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes.
Emphasis on adjustable qubits and adjustable couplers for optimizing control and scalability.
Scaling Challenges and Solutions:
Strategies for achieving scale, including using large dilution refrigerators and exploring optical communication for modular design.
Plans to address error correction and wiring challenges using brute force scaling and advanced materials.
Future Vision and Speeding Up Development:
QoLab’s goal to significantly accelerate the timeline toward achieving a million-qubit system.
Insight into collaborations with HP Enterprises, NVIDIA, Quantum Machines, and others to combine expertise in hardware and software.