The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology

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. Resources & Links Guest & Lab Daniel Loss' profile at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals Daniel Loss — University of Basel, Condensed Matter Theory & Quantum Computing Group — Loss's lab page; lists current research areas, group members, and leadership roles including NCCR SPIN. Daniel Loss — Wikipedia — Comprehensive biographical overview, career history, and awards list for listeners who want background before or after listening. Papers & Articles Classical Reversible Computation by Quantum Coherence — arXiv:2607.06219v3 (2026) — The central paper discussed in this episode; v3 adds a reversible-adder blueprint, control-electronics energy analysis, and optimized pulse sequences. Loss-DiVincenzo: Quantum Computation with Quantum Dots — Physical Review A (1998) — The foundational 1997/1998 proposal that started the spin-qubit field; cited more than 9,000 times and the direct ancestor of the hardware Loss now proposes for classical reversible computing. Long-Range Crossed Andreev Reflection in a Topological Insulator Nanowire — Nature Physics (2025) — A 2025 result from the Loss group with implications for topological quantum computing, showing the breadth of the research program surrounding this episode's topic. Prof. Daniel Loss Named Citation Laureate 2025 in Physics — NCCR SPIN — Announcement of Loss's Clarivate recognition; useful context for why this conversation is happening now. Organizations NCCR SPIN — National Center of Competence in Research: Spin Qubits in Silicon — Switzerland's national spin-qubit research center, co-directed by Loss; the institutional home of much of the experimental work Loss references. Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics — Loss's new external scientific membership, signaling a push to connect topological quantum magnetism theory with experiment. Key Quotes & Insights > "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...

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. Multiverse Computing — Official Website — Home page for CompactifAI, Singularity, and Multiverse's full product portfolio. Papers & Articles Discussed in This Episode arXiv 2605.05914 — "Quantum-enhanced Large Language Models on Quantum Hardware via Cayley Unitary Adapters" (May 2026) — The paper at the center of the episode: Llama 3.1 8B layers running on IBM's 156-qubit Quantum System Two. Start here if you want the technical details behind the quantum-in-an-LLM result. Multiverse Computing — "Talking to a Quantum Computer" (May 2026) — The accessible blog-post version of the Cayley Unitary Adapter experiment; a good entry point before tackling the arXiv paper. arXiv 2401.14109 — CompactifAI: Extreme Compression of Large Language Models Using Quantum-Inspired Tensor Networks — The foundational peer-reviewed paper introducing Multiverse's tensor network compression method. arXiv 2509.06653 — "Classical Neural Networks on Quantum Devices via Tensor Network Disentanglers" (Sep 2025, rev. Apr 2026) — Orús, Singh, and Aizpurua on hybrid classical-quantum execution for bottleneck neural network layers; the research underpinning the longer-term hybrid architecture vision. Models & Products HyperNova 60B on Hugging Face — Open-source 50%-compressed model derived from GPT-OSS-120B; context for Multiverse's open model strategy. Pulsar 16B Launch with NVIDIA (June 2026) — Announcement of Multiverse's open reasoning model, scoring 87.22 on AIME 2025 at 16B parameters. Funding & Company Context Series C Announcement — GlobeNewswire (July 2026) — $570M / €500M round at $1.7B pre-money valuation; covers investor lineup and deployment verticals. Key Quotes & Insights > "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, ...

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. Piotr Lewandowski on YouTube — His channel covering quantum computing job market analysis and platform updates. Papers & Reports EPJ Quantum Technology — "The quantum technology job market: data-driven analysis of 3,641 job posts" (March 2026) — Lewandowski's peer-reviewed paper on the quantum job market, the most rigorous published treatment of the data underlying qubitsok. 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. Recognition Dr. Bob Sutor's "Quantum Follow Friday" (February 27, 2026) — Sutor Group newsletter highlighting Lewandowski as a key quantum community voice worth following; useful context for his growing recognition as an independent analyst. Key Quotes & Insights 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...

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 Resources & Links Guest & Organization Richard Entrup — Worth Magazine Profile — Career arc from CIO/CISO roles at major global brands to KPMG's Emerging Solutions practice KPMG Quantum Dawn (2025) — KPMG's enterprise quantum readiness hub, introducing the Q-PREP framework and PQC implementation services, with Entrup as named lead KPMG Quantum homepage Reports & Research KPMG — "The Quantum Threat Is No Longer Theoretical" (2026) — The threat brief discussed in this episode, charting the rapid decline in qubits needed to crack RSA-2048 and urging immediate PQC migration KPMG — "From Theory to Impact: Real-World Results in Quantum Machine Learning" (2026) — KPMG's joint report with IBM and Kipu Quantum on measurable quantum ML results on real hardware KPMG — "Prepare Now for Quantum Cyber Risk" — Board Leadership Article (2026) — C-suite and board-level guidance on integrating quantum risk into enterprise oversight arXiv — "Quantum-enhanced satellite image classification" (2026) — The underlying research paper behind the KPMG/IBM/Kipu Quantum ML results Ecosystem & Events Chicago Quantum Exchange — KPMG Joins CQE (October 2024) — Announcement of KPMG's formal CQE membership, referenced in the episode as part of the firm's ecosystem-building strategy KPMG 2026 Quantum Consortium — The inaugural KPMG Quantum Consortium event (March 2026, Orlando) discussed in the episode Independent Coverage Quantum Computing Report — KPMG joins Chicago Quantum Exchange (2024) — Independent coverage of KPMG's CQE partnership and enterprise quantum strategy Quantum Zeitgeist — Kipu Quantum satellite imagery coverage (Feb 2026) — Independent analysis of the KPMG/IBM/Kipu hybrid QML results Key Quotes & Insights > "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 —

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. Resources & Links Guest Thaddeus D. Ladd — Personal Website & Publications — Self-curated, annotated bibliography; the best single source for his research arc across spin qubits and quantum communication. Thaddeus Ladd — Hertz Foundation Profile — Biographical overview of his career and role at HRL. Thaddeus D. Ladd — Google Scholar — Full citation record. Papers & Articles A Digitally Controlled Silicon Quantum Processing Unit — arXiv (April 2026) — The QPU paper discussed at length in this episode: 54-dot device, cryo-CMOS controller at 4 K, superconducting ribbon cable, and error correction experiments — all working as one integrated system. Universal Logic with Encoded Spin Qubits in Silicon — Nature (2023) — The landmark result demonstrating universal logic with exchange-only encoded qubits; Ladd was co-author and lead theorist. Two-Dimensional Si Spin Qubit Arrays with Multilevel Interconnects — PRX Quantum (2025) — Scalable 2D spin-qubit arrays achieving greater than 99.9% single-qubit gate fidelity; the step between the 2023 and 2026 results. Silicon Encoded Spin Qubits Achieve Universality — HRL (2023) — HRL's public announcement of the Nature result; accessible summary for non-specialists. Semiconductor Spin Qubits: The Certainty of Progress — HRL (December 2025) — HRL's public framing of the platform's trajectory, published shortly before the Q2B meeting where Sebastian and Thaddeus first met. Acquisition & IBM Strategy IBM to Acquire HRL Laboratories — IBM Newsroom (July 23, 2026) — The definitive transaction announcement; names the full scope of what IBM says it is acquiring. IBM to Acquire HRL Laboratories — HRL Laboratories (July 23, 2026) — HRL's concise confirmation of the deal and the beginning of regulatory review. What Are Spin Qubits? — IBM Quantum (July 23, 2026) — IBM's technical explanation of HRL's Si/SiGe exchange-only qubits and the shared silicon fabrication argument. A Brief History of HRL Laboratories — IBM Research (July 23, 2026) — IBM's institutional framing of HRL, including its history with the laser, self-aligned-gate MOS fabrication, and the 2026 spin-qubit QPU. IBM and U.S. Department of Commerce Announce Anderon Quantum Foundry (May 21, 2026) — The 300 mm quantum foundry announcement that Thaddeus identifies as one of the clearest pieces of strategic logic behind the HRL acquisition. IBM Commits More Than $10 Billion to Quantum Computing (June 2, 2026) — Capital context for the acquisition: R&D, manufacturing scale-up, M&A, and ecosystem investment over five years. Tools & Platforms spinQICK — GitHub — HRL's open-source FPGA-based spin-qubit control toolkit; a concrete artifact of HRL's approach to open tooling. HRL Launches Open-Source spinQICK — HRL (July 2025) — Announcement and context for the spinQICK release. HRL Quantum — Collection of HRL quantum research, talks, and news. Organizations <...

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. Papers & Research arXiv:2602.18350 — Quantum-enhanced satellite image classification — The peer-reviewed KPMG/Kipu Quantum/IBM paper Aaron co-authored, demonstrating hybrid quantum-classical accuracy gains on IBM processors. From Theory to Impact: Real-World Results in Quantum Machine Learning — KPMG's editorial summary of the satellite imagery research, framed for enterprise readers. From Theory to Impact — Full Technical Report (PDF) — The detailed technical companion walking through the hybrid pipeline step by step. PQC & Enterprise Frameworks Q-PREP: Seven Steps to Post-Quantum Cryptography Readiness (PDF) — KPMG's prescriptive PQC migration framework, with Aaron as lead author. The Quantum Threat Is No Longer Theoretical (PDF) — Aaron's board-level brief on Q-Day urgency. Prepare Now for Quantum Cyber Risk (KPMG Board Leadership Center) — Aaron's article for corporate directors, originally in NACD Directorship Online. Related Coverage & Commentary Kipu Quantum: Quantum-Enhanced AI Deployable in Production — Announcement of the production framework that removes quantum hardware from the inference loop; Aaron quoted as enterprise champion. KPMG's Seven Steps Build Quantum Resilience for Businesses (Quantum Zeitgeist) — Third-party coverage of Q-PREP. A Framework Can Tell You What to Do. It Cannot Tell You What You Have. (Qtonic Substack) — A critical response arguing that advisory frameworks don't solve the underlying cryptographic inventory problem — useful counterpoint reading. Key Quotes & Insights 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. Related Episodes Episode 14: A Hybrid NISQ-Classical Solution Architecture with Harry Buhrman — Foundational thinking on hybrid quantum-classical architectures relevant to the Kipu/KPMG/IBM approach. Episode 38: Quantum Machine Learning with Jessica Pointing — A rigorous look at the tradeoffs and open questions in QML that frame Aaron's satellite imagery results. Episode 81: Quantum LDPC error correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster — Directly relevant to the compressing resource estimates for breaking RSA that shape PQC urgency. Episode 86: Quantum Advantage Achieved with Dominik Hangleiter — A theorist's careful framing of what advantage claims should and shouldn't mean. Episode 40: Integrating Quantum Computers and Classical Supercomputers with Martin Schultz — Useful context on the heterogeneous compute future Aaron and Sebastian discuss at the end of the episode. Stay in the Ecosystem Subscribe on

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 Resources & Links Guest & Organizations Barak Bussel bio — UCLA CQSE Strategic Board — Official page covering Barak's role as Board Chair and his physics and venture background. 7i Capital — Barak's deep tech venture firm, investing across quantum, AI, semiconductors, cybersecurity, robotics, clean energy, and space. UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering (CQSE) — The multidisciplinary center Barak chairs, spanning physics and engineering research. Barak Bussel on LinkedIn — Where Barak has publicly flagged the Oratomic investment and the June 2026 executive orders. The Oratomic Round and Recent Breakthroughs Oratomic raises $300M Series A — The Quantum Insider — Confirms 7i Capital in the syndicate for the largest-ever first institutional round in quantum computing. Oratomic Series A deep dive — Quantum Computing Report — Technical breakdown of the reconfigurable neutral-atom architecture and full investor syndicate. Oratomic's "no intermediate product" strategy — MLQ.ai — Analysis of Oratomic's bet against the QuEra/Pasqal early-revenue playbook. QEDMA raises $26M Series A — Quantum Zeitgeist — 7i portfolio company Kedma's error mitigation round with IBM participation, referenced in Barak's Ising model results. Policy and Market Context White House EO: "Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation" — One of the two June 22, 2026 executive orders Barak discusses. Sidley Austin analysis of the June 2026 quantum EOs — Legal explainer covering both the innovation EO and the post-quantum cryptography mandate. Cloudflare on the accelerated post-quantum timeline — Notes that Q-Day estimates have moved in response to Google and Oratomic breakthroughs. PitchBook Q2 2026 Quantum Computing Funding Report — Record 2025 VC totals and Q1 2026 liquidity data relevant to Barak's exit thesis. UCLA Research Park and Regional Ecosystem UCLA launches SoCal Quantum Alliance — The regional coalition Barak references, with founding members including Caltech, JPL, Boeing, IBM, and Cisco. Quantum Innovation Hub at the UCLA Research Park — Preview of the 40,000 square foot lab space and the broader research park vision Barak describes. Quantum Innovation Hub Director appointment — Prof. Jason Petta named to lead the QIH, one of the founding anchors of the research park. Key Quotes & Insights 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...

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 Resources & Links Guest & Organization Kate Waimey Timmerman — Chicago Quantum Exchange Profile Chicago Quantum Exchange — About — Overview of CQE's 2026 milestones, member institutions, and program portfolio The Bloch Quantum Tech Hub ($55M EDA Award) UChicago News — CQE-led Bloch Quantum Tech Hub raises $55 million — Primary announcement of the July 2026 EDA award Quantum Computing Report — Bloch Quantum Tech Hub Secures $55M — Technical analysis of the award and its manufacturing focus The Quantum Insider — Bloch Raises $55M — Coverage including corporate commitments from IBM, IonQ, and Infleqtion The Quantum Insider — Bloch Advances in EDA Competition — Background on the tri-state coalition structure across Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana Workforce & Economic Development HPCwire — CQE Releases Unified Strategy to Scale Midwest Quantum Workforce — Coverage of the NSF-backed "Advancing Together" report referenced in the conversation Argonne National Laboratory — Quantum Prairie Economic Symposium — Includes BCG's regional workforce and economic impact projections Illinois Economic Development Corporation — Kate Timmerman — Context on CQE's growth and Illinois' quantum strategy Programs & Tools Mentioned UChicago PME — K1 joins CQE — Example of the Founders Platform bringing quantum-enabling startups into the ecosystem Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park (IQMP) — Context on the physical infrastructure supporting the Chicago quantum ecosystem Quantumzeitgeist — Bloch Drives $55M Quantum Prairie Expansion — Additional analysis on the domestic supply-chain focus Key Quotes & Insights 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." Related Episodes Ep. 82 — The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson — The complementary conversation on IQMP, the physical infrastructure that Kate's ecosystem work plugs into. Ep. 75 — Regional quantum development with Alejandra Y. Castillo — Former EDA leadership on the policy logic behind Tech Hubs and inclusive regional innovation.

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 Resources & Links Guest & Organization Announcing Our New CEO — Unitary Foundation — The February 2026 announcement of Ben as UF's first CEO, with the full arc from Chief of Staff to COO to CEO. Ben Castanon on LinkedIn — Ben's professional history, including his Pioneer Works tenure and current UF work. Unitary Foundation — The organization's homepage and hub for grants, tools, membership, and community. Papers & Reports 2025 Quantum Open Source Software Survey Results — The fourth annual QOSS survey, including the finding that ~40% of full-time contributors are unpaid. The Young and the Relentless — The Quantum Insider — Independent coverage of the QOSS survey's demographic findings. Celebrating Over 100 Microgrants — Impact report: 420+ citing papers, 3 startups, 1 nonprofit, and 400+ OSS contributors funded. Tools & Programs Unitary Compiler Collection (UCC) — The frontend-agnostic quantum compiler collection Ben references as a candidate for the open substrate. UCC on GitHub — The active repo, supporting Qiskit, Cirq, PyTKET, and OpenQASM 2/3. unitaryHACK 2026 — The sixth annual bug-bounty hackathon, one of UF's core mechanisms for compensating open-source contributors. Ecosystem NVIDIA Joins Unitary Foundation as Core Member — The May 2026 announcement referenced in the conversation. Announcing Unitary Foundation (Rebrand) — Context on why "Unitary Fund" became "Unitary Foundation." Key Quotes & Insights 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." Related Episodes Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat — The direct companion to this episode, unpacking the white paper co-authored with Ben on why quantum OSS is structurally underfunded. Quantum Error Mitigation using Mitiq with Misty Wahl — A deeper look at Mitiq, one of UF's flagship open-source tools. Quantum Education and Community Building with Olivia Lanes — A parallel view on developer community and workforce development in quantum. Careers in Quantum with Anastasia Marchenkova — Relevant context on where quantum developers actually end up. Stay in the Ecosystem Subscribe to The New Quantum Era on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , YouTube , or Amazon Music . Sign up for the newsletter at newquantumera.com for episode notes, essays, and follow-ups. Follow along on LinkedIn and Bluesky . If you're building open-source quantum tools — or want to support the people who are — start at unitary.foundation . ...

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. MIT Sloan — New MIT Report Captures State of Quantum Computing — Background on the QIR and Galatsanos's research role at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. MIT Sloan — Quantum Report Charts Growing Business Interest — Further QIR findings on the growth in corporate quantum mentions. Press & Coverage Diffraqtion Pre-Seed Announcement (PR Newswire) — Official release covering the $4.2M raise, DARPA contract, and founding team. Breaking Defense — DARPA Backs Diffraqtion — The most in-depth interview on the DARPA SBIR contract and programmable light plates. The Quantum Insider — Diffraqtion $4.2M Raise — Investor context including quotes from Chad Rigetti; technical claims on resolution and processing. Payload Space — Diffraqtion Emerges from Stealth — Commercial framing around the 6U CubeSat cost model. Defense One — Quantum Cameras Could Remake Space-Based Intelligence — Policy and defense framing. Sponsor Cisco Universal Quantum Switch — Outshift by Cisco — Cisco's incubation engine, building a scalable quantum network on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. Key Quotes & Insights 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. Related Episodes Ep. 65 — Quantum sensitivity breakthrough with Eli Levenson-Falk — On protocols that push measurements beyond conventional limits; a natural companion to the Fisher information discussion. Ep. 16 — Operating at the Quantum Limit with Dr. Dana Anderson — Infleqtion's CSO on quantum sensing alongside computing; useful context for why sensing is closer to deployment. Ep. 68 — Incubating quantum innovation with Vijoy Pandey of Outshift by Cisco — On quantum networks solving real problems today; a parallel to Diffraqtion's near-term deployment argument. Ep. 63 — A Programming Language for Quantum Simulations with Xiaodi Wu — Also from the University of...

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? --- 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 --- Resources & Links Guest & Host Links Robert W. Karr Jr. — Barnes & Thornburg Attorney Profile — Bob's firm bio covering his role as partner and QTI Group co-chair Robert W. Karr Jr. — LinkedIn — Recent activities including the Illinois–UK Quantum Partnerships Mission and Keidanren Next-Gen Salon Quantum Law Navigator — Chicago Quantum Exchange (PDF) — The ten-chapter resource Bob led, mapping the U.S. legal and regulatory landscape for quantum Barnes & Thornburg Quantum Technology Industry Group — The firm's quantum practice, host of the live recording The Book & Documentary 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 Episodes & Guests Referenced Episode 82 — The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson — The IQMP's CEO on building the world's largest dedicated quantum technology park Episode 79 — Building a Quantum Ecosystem from Scratch with Martin Laforest — How Quebec built a $400M quantum ecosystem with a deliberate public-to-private capital transition Episode 75 — Regional Quantum Development with Alejandra Y. Castillo — Quantum through the economic development lens: jobs, supply chains, housing, and community participation Episode 77 — Quantum Leadership with Nadya Mason — The dean of UChicago's Pritzker School on the human and institutional side of building the quantum era Episodes 48, 67, 71 — John Martinis — From Josephson junctions to the Google quantum supremacy experiment to the open-architecture approach at CoLab Episode 96 — Funding the Quantum Middle with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures — Why the Series A/B financing gap is the new bottleneck, and how specialist investors are stepping in Key Institutions & Ecosystem Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park — Wikipedia — Overview of the $9B IQMP, its tenants,...

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. Resources & Links Guest & Company Daniel Faircloth Bio — Nullspace, Inc. — Background on Daniel's path from GTRI and IERUS to co-founding Nullspace. Nullspace, Inc. — Company homepage covering the Nullspace EM and Nullspace ES product suites. Inside Nullspace: Rethinking Electromagnetic Simulation with Dr. Daniel Faircloth — A longer-form interview on why Daniel rebuilt EM simulation from scratch. Product & Technical Resources Nullspace ES — Electrostatic Simulation for Quantum Computing — Product page detailing the ion-trap-specific capabilities discussed in the episode. Nullspace ES 2025 R1 Tech Brief — The release notes behind the high-order basis functions and 5× memory reduction Daniel describes. Precision Ion Trap Modeling and Simulation for Quantum Applications — Webinar featuring Oxford Ionics' Curtis Volin demonstrating Nullspace ES on a surface-electrode trap. Papers & Background Reading Reliable Transport Through a Microfabricated X-Junction Surface-Electrode Ion Trap (NJP, 2013) — The GTRI paper Daniel co-authored, including the corner-turning ion transport work referenced in the episode. Daniel Faircloth — ResearchGate profile — Additional EM and ion trap publications from Daniel's GTRI/IERUS years. Company & Funding Context Nullspace Raises $2.5M Seed Round (PR Newswire, Aug 2025) — The seed round led by Fathom Fund with Golden Seeds. Nullspace Raises $2.5M — The Quantum Insider — Quantum-sector framing of the dual-use RF/quantum positioning. Nullspace Inc. Launches as an Engineering Software Company (PR Newswire, Jun 2023) — The spin-out announcement and origin story. Key Quotes & Insights 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." Related Episodes Episode 91 — Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy — A complementary view of simulation infrastructure, focused on superconducting digital twins. Episode 17 — The Enchilada: Microfabricated Ion Trap Qubits with Daniel Stick — The Sandia pers...

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. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com . Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for . What We Get Into 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. EeroQ Publications — Peer-reviewed papers and preprints from the team. Building a Quantum Computer in Reverse (EeroQ Blog, July 2023) — Farina's own articulation of the scale-first design philosophy discussed in the episode. Key Papers Koolstra, Glen, Beysengulov et al., "Strong coupling of a microwave photon to an electron on helium," Nature Physics , June 2026 — First demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and the quantized motional state of a single electron on helium, including observation of vacuum Rabi splitting — establishing the cavity-QED readout link at the heart of EeroQ's architecture. This result was under embargo when the episode was recorded. Castoria et al., "Sensing and Control of Single Trapped Electrons Above 1 Kelvin," Physical Review X (2025) — The 1 K result Nick references; demonstrates charge sensing but not yet coherent spin manipulation. Koolstra et al., "High-impedance Resonators for Strong Coupling to an Electron on Helium," Physical Review Applied (Feb 2025) — The resonator architecture underlying EeroQ's cQED control approach. 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 . Press & Context EeroQ Makes World-First Breakthrough in Electron Qubits Floating on Helium (EeroQ, June 2026) — Company announcement of the Nature Physics strong-coupling result. EeroQ Solves the "Wire Problem" (PRNewswire, Jan 2026) — The million-electrons / fewer-than-50-wires result Nick cites. Individual electrons trapped and controlled above 1 K (Phys.org) — Independent coverage of the PRX paper. EeroQ Achieves Tape-Out of "Wonder Lake" Chip (The Quantum Insider, July 2023) — Background on the 2,432-site CMOS chip discussed in the episode. Ecosystem Chicago Quantum Exchange — The regional consortium EeroQ benefits from. Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park — The state-backed quantum park anchored in Chicago. Key Quotes & Insights 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...

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. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com . Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for . What We Get Into 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 — University of Helsinki Research Portal — Publication record covering open quantum systems, non-Markovian dynamics, and quantum information. Sabrina Maniscalco — AI for Good Bio — Consolidated bio covering academic roles and advisory positions, including IQOQI Austria and CERN's Quantum Technology Initiative. The Q4Bio Win Algorithmiq Wins $2M Wellcome Leap Q4Bio Prize — Company announcement detailing the photodynamic therapy workflow. Wellcome Leap — Q4Bio Prize Announcement — Funder's perspective on finalists and criteria. IBM Quantum Blog — Q4Bio Finalists — IBM's account of the workflow and quantum-classical integration. Funding & HQ Move Tech.eu — Algorithmiq's €18M Series B and Milan move — Coverage of Italy's largest quantum VC round to date. Quantum Computing Report — Algorithmiq Relocates to Milan — Strategic context including the Q4Bio win and IBM partnership. EU-Startups coverage — Investor lineup and Italy's National Quantum Strategy framing. Quantum Advantage & Tooling IBM Quantum Blog — The Dawn of Quantum Advantage — Includes Algorithmiq's TEM (Tensor Network Error Mitigation) function in the Qiskit Functions catalog. Algorithmiq & IBM Quantum Advantage Tracker — The heterogeneous materials experiment Algorithmiq and IBM put forward as a community benchmark. Silicon Republic interview with Sabrina — Useful prior context on her philosophy of using quantum to simulate quantum systems. Key Quotes & Insights 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 ...

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. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com . Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for . What We Get Into 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. Firgun Ventures on Crunchbase — Confirms London HQ, global mandate, and Series A/B focus. Fund Launch & Thesis Firgun Ventures Launches $250M VC Fund to Invest in Quantum — The Quantum Insider — Launch details, QIA anchor commitment, and founder backgrounds. Firgun Ventures Launches With $70M for Quantum Tech Innovation — TechFundingNews — Deeper breakdown of the LP roster and market rationale. Firgun Ventures: Scaling Quantum Beyond the Early Stages — Future of Computing — Extended interview with Kris and Zeynep on the Series A/B bottleneck. Portfolio Companies Mentioned Firgun Invests in Photonic Inc. — The Quantum Insider — Firgun's first portfolio investment in DARPA-validated Photonic Inc. Photonic Inc.'s World-First Quantum Teleportation — QC Report — Technical context on the "Entanglement First" silicon-spin/photonic architecture. Photonic Inc. Closes $200M+ Round — The Quantum Insider — Final close at a $2B valuation. Quantum Motion Raises $160M Series C — The Quantum Insider — Firgun's first European investment in silicon CMOS quantum computing. Quantum Motion's Silicon CMOS Approach — Technologies.org — Technical analysis of the CMOS scalability thesis. Key Quotes & Insights 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

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. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com . Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for . What We Get Into 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. Papers & Articles QuEra and collaborators on Algorithmic Fault Tolerance ( Nature , 2025) — The paper behind the claim that syndrome measurements can happen per algorithmic block rather than per operation. HPCwire coverage of the AFT result — Independent take on the 10–100x runtime overhead reduction. IEEE Spectrum on neutral-atom quantum computing in 2026 — Context for the AIST Gemini deployment and Yuval's time-to-solution argument. 2026 Quantum Readiness Report, Part 2 — The survey of 291 stakeholders behind Yuval's "show-me phase" framing of the market. Books A New Quantum Era by Sebastian Hassinger — Sebastian's outsider's introduction to quantum computing, referenced throughout the conversation. Quantum Bits: A Comic Book Guide to Quantum Computing by Yuval Boger — Yuval's illustrated explainer, with a glossary covering terms from superposition to QLDPC codes. Background Reading Mentioned 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." Related Episodes Episode 18 — Neutral atom arrays with Alex Keesling of QuEra Computing — Sebastian's earlier conversation with QuEra's CEO on the foundational technology.

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 . Go deeper with the blog post. What We Get Into 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. Resources & Links Guest Links Matthias Christandl — University of Copenhagen Research Portal — Official institutional profile with publications and affiliations. Quantum for Life Center — University of Copenhagen — The Novo Nordisk Foundation–funded center Christandl leads, focused on quantum algorithms for the life sciences. UCPH Quantum Hub launch — The cross-faculty quantum community Christandl helped found at the University of Copenhagen. Christandl appointed 2024 Turing Chair — CWI/QuSoft — Background on his honorary visiting chair at QuSoft and CWI in Amsterdam. Papers & Articles Fault-Tolerant Coding for Quantum Communication (arXiv:2009.07161) — The foundational paper (IEEE TIT 2024, with Müller-Hermes) that motivates the episode: channel coding when the encoder and decoder circuits themselves are noisy. Fundamental Limit on the Power of Entanglement Assistance in Quantum Communication (arXiv:2408.17290) — Christandl and collaborators settle a 2002 conjecture of Bennett et al. on entanglement-assisted capacity (PRL 2025). Asymptotic tensor rank is characterized by polynomials (arXiv:2411.15789) — STOC 2025 result connecting tensor theory to the matrix multiplication exponent. How to Use Quantum Computers for Biomolecular Free Energies (2026) More Quantum Chemistry with Fewer Qubits — Physical Review Research (2024) — The Quantum for Life paper underlying the protein–ligand workflow discussed in the episode. A Cornerstone of Entanglement Theory Restored — Nature Physics (2025) — Christandl's News & Views on the re-proof of the generalized quantum Stein's lemma. Quantum Duel: Matthias Christandl x Gil Kalai Key Quotes & Insights 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 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 . Go deeper with the blog post. What We Get Into 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 Resources & Links Guest Links Elise Crull — CCNY Faculty Profile — Her institutional home, with current research interests and talks. Elise Crull — CUNY Graduate Center Profile — Full publications list including forthcoming work. Elise Crull — Academia.edu — Preprint archive, including her 2024 Leggett–Garg/Feyerabend paper and earlier decoherence work. Books & Papers The Einstein Paradox (Bacciagaluppi & Crull, Cambridge UP, 2024) — The archival reconstruction of the debate EPR unleashed; the centerpiece of the conversation. Ryckman's BJPS review of The Einstein Paradox (2025) — A scholarly assessment of what the book changes about how we read 1935. "Realism with Quantum Faces: The Leggett–Garg Inequalities as a Case Study for Feyerabend's Views" (Crull, 2024) — Her most recent standalone article on macroscopic realism. "Physics Scratches a Philosopher's Itch" — APS Physics (2022) — A feature on her work on indefinite causal ordering and causation. Helgoland & History Physics World : Helgoland 2025 — the Inside Story — Post-event report on the centenary where Sebastian and Elise first met. AIP: "What Happened on Helgoland" — Historiographical pushback on the Heisenberg origin myth. AIP: Crull on Hertha Sponer and the path to wave/particle duality (2026) — Her most recent piece on how standard histories minimize experimentalists. For General Audiences StarTalk: "The Philosophy of Physics with Elise Crull" (June 2025) — Crull with Neil deGrasse Tyson, kicking off the Einstein Paradox promotion cycle. StarTalk: "How Quantum Physics Complicates Objective Truth" (April 2026) — A complementary, more recent treatment of the same themes. Key Quotes & Insights 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 .

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 . Go deeper with the blog post. What We Get Into 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 Qblox North America HQ announcement — Context for the Boston expansion discussed in the episode Qblox "Made in America" manufacturing announcement — Background on the Canton, MA manufacturing milestone Partnerships Discussed Fermilab × Qblox QICK partnership announcement — The DOE-backed deal for Qblox to manufacture and distribute QICK Quantum Utility Block press release — Joint reference system with QuantWare and Q-CTRL referenced in the episode APS 2024 full-stack demo recap — The 48-hour conference-floor build Niels mentions Foundational Paper "Feedback Control of a Solid-State Qubit Using High-Fidelity Projective Measurement" — Ristè, Bultink et al., the 2012 work that grounds Niels's perspective on real-time control Funding & Market Context Qblox Series A announcement — Context for the revenue-first growth story discussed The Quantum Insider on the Series A — Independent coverage with quotes from Quantonation Key Quotes & Insights 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. Stay in the Ecosystem Subscribe on Apple Podcasts ,

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. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for ==================================================================================================== What We Get Into 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 Resources & Links Guest & Company Izhar Medalsy — Quantum Elements team page — Background and role at Quantum Elements. Izhar Medalsy on LinkedIn — Full career arc from ETH biophysics through 3D printing to quantum. Quantum Elements — Constellation platform, where listeners can build their own virtual QPU and run circuits, error suppression, and QEC experiments. Papers & Articles AWS Quantum Computing Blog: Decoding realistic QEC syndrome with Quantum Elements digital twins — Primary technical reference for the 97-qubit distance-7 result discussed in the episode. The Next Platform: How HPC and AI Digital Twins Accelerate Quantum Error Correction (Apr 17, 2026) — Independent reporting on the AWS/USC/Harvard simulation. The Quantum Insider: Quantum Elements & Rigetti collaboration (Apr 21, 2026) — Details on the partnership Izhar describes. Guest post: Quantum Digital Twins — The Missing Acceleration Layer — Izhar's own framing of the thesis. The Next Platform: Startup Profile of Quantum Elements (Jan 2026) — Background on the company. arXiv 2603.14607 — Calibration-Based Digital Twins for IBM Quantum Hardware — Useful independent context on the limits and promise of calibration-based twins. Key Quotes & Insights "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. Related Episodes Episode 52 — Quantum noise with Daniel Lidar — Quantum Elements' co-founder and CSO on the noise suppression and error correction foundat...