The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology
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Quantum Policy, Topological Qubits, and the Maryland Research Center with Charles Tahan
2 november 2026 · 55 min
Charles Tahan has one of the most unique career arcs in quantum: PhD in silicon quantum computing, postdoc across three continents, fifteen years at the Lab for Physical Sciences running quantum programs and doing original research, then the first Director of the National Quantum Coordination Office at the White House OSTP, and now a Partner at Microsoft Quantum. He is one of the very few people who has both written U.S. quantum policy and is now executing on it from inside a major hardware program. That dual vantage point — policymaker turned builder — gives him a kind of credibility that is rare in a field full of either pure researchers or pure advocates. Lees meer
The timing of this conversation matters too. Microsoft just opened a 15,000-square-foot quantum research center at the University of Maryland's Discovery District, and DARPA has been given on-site access to the Majorana 2 system as part of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative — the first opportunity for a technically capable independent party to evaluate Microsoft's topological qubit claims. Tahan is candid about the difficulty of what Microsoft is attempting, honest about the timelines, and enthusiastic about the parts of this problem that most people in his position would prefer to keep vague.
Listeners who follow quantum hardware development, national science policy, or the workforce and ecosystem questions around quantum will find this episode unusually grounded.
What We Get Into
How Tahan ended up in government in the first place — starting as a DARPA technical consultant in 2007, helping write the milestones for the first quantum computing programs, and eventually becoming the first Director of the National Quantum Coordination Office
What the NQI actually accomplished — and why Tahan argues its most important effect wasn't the money itself but the signal it sent globally, triggering coordinated national strategies across dozens of countries
Why topological qubits are worth the difficulty — Tahan's h…
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Atomic-Precision Silicon Qubits and the Path to Fault Tolerance with Michelle Simmons
26 oktober 2026 · 38 min
Michelle Simmons is the founder and CEO of Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) and a Scientia Professor at UNSW Sydney. She is one of the few people in the field who has simultaneously run a 200-person academic research centre, founded Australia's first vertically integrated quantum computing company, shaped how the community publishes its results (as inaugural editor-in-chief of npj Quantum Information), and influenced national quantum policy. That combination of roles gives her an unusually grounded view of what is actually hard — in the physics, in the manufacturing, and in the business. Lees meer
The conversation is happening at a specific inflection point. SQC published two landmark Nature papers within ten weeks of each other in late 2025 and early 2026 — an 11-qubit silicon processor with two-qubit gate fidelities reaching 99.99%, and a 15,000-site analogue simulator demonstrating a metal-insulator transition. The company has advanced to Stage B of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program whose stated opening position is skepticism that fault-tolerant quantum computing is achievable by 2033. And SQC is now shipping an analog quantum AI chip to commercial customers. This episode is for anyone who wants to understand what silicon spin qubits actually are, why the donor-qubit approach is architecturally distinct from the CMOS-foundry approaches most competitors use, and what a credible long-range quantum roadmap looks like when it is grounded in manufacturing reality rather than theoretical aspiration.
What We Get Into
Why qubit quality improves with scale in SQC's system — the physical intuition behind using phosphorus donor atoms as "nature's perfect qubit," and why minimizing interfaces is the key insight that separates this approach from gate-defined quantum dots
The STM as a manufacturing tool, not just a microscope — how Simmons reframed the scanning tunneling microscope as the atomic-scale equivalent of an ASML stepper, and why 25 years of development no…
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Building a Regional Quantum Ecosystem with Corey Stambaugh
19 oktober 2026 · 30 min
Corey Stambaugh is one of the few people in the quantum world who has worked at the bench, inside federal policy, and now as the operational lead of a major public-private ecosystem initiative. He came up as a precision measurement physicist at NIST, moved to the White House's National Quantum Coordination Office as a senior policy advisor, and now directs the Capital of Quantum — Maryland's statewide effort to translate decades of university research into a commercial quantum industry cluster anchored in the Discovery District at the University of Maryland. Lees meer
This conversation was recorded at the close of the 2026 Quantum World Congress, a week in which Maryland opened the Microsoft Quantum Research Center, announced Riverlane's U.S. headquarters in the Discovery District, welcomed QuEra Computing into the building, and unveiled a new partnership with Paladin Capital Group. If you follow quantum economic development, workforce policy, or the question of which regions are actually building durable quantum infrastructure versus generating press releases, this episode gives you a rare inside view from someone threading all of it together.
What We Get Into
How the Capital of Quantum actually came together — the decades of university research that preceded the January 2025 launch, and what it took to stand up a formal initiative on top of that foundation
What "150,000 square feet and a fridge at 14 millikelvin" means in practice — the Discovery Center build-out, from Microsoft buying the building to pumping down their dilution refrigerator in under a year
Why the tenant list spans almost every major hardware modality — IQM (superconducting), Quantum Motion (silicon CMOS), Microsoft (topological), IonQ (trapped ion), QuEra (neutral atom), and Riverlane (error correction software) are all in or adjacent to the same building, and whether that's strategy or circumstance
The DARPA Capital Quantum Benchmarking Hub — Maryland is one of three states with a memorandum of ag…
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Quantum Workforce, Sensing, and the Long Game of Operationalization with Isabella Martinez
12 oktober 2026 · 38 min
Isabella Martinez sits at an unusual intersection in the quantum ecosystem: she's not primarily a hardware researcher or an algorithm theorist, but a practitioner who has to make quantum work in operational environments — for customers who have real missions, real constraints, and very little patience for technology that can't be deployed. Her team at Booz Allen spans quantum computing, quantum sensing, and post-quantum cryptography, which means she's watching all three of the field's major near-term vectors simultaneously. Lees meer
This conversation was recorded at Quantum World Congress 2026, and it reflects the mood of that moment: sensing is on the cusp of real deployment, PQC migration is being driven by policy urgency, and quantum computing is still asking the question of when — but the "when" is getting more specific. If you work in quantum and care about how the technology actually crosses the gap from lab to mission, this episode is for you. It's also a genuinely useful listen for anyone thinking about quantum careers, workforce development, or how to build teams that can navigate a technology that doesn't yet have a playbook.
What We Get Into
Why Isabella's biomedical engineering capstone — not a physics class — shaped her entire approach to quantum: The lesson wasn't about building a better device; it was about why a life-saving tool sat unused because no one had time to get trained on it.
The four-stage commercialization arc she uses to frame quantum maturity: Solve for physics, then engineering, then business case, then operationalization — and why that last step is the one the field talks about least.
What quantum sensing deployment actually looks like right now: Including a vivid example of a quantum PNT sensor that "can't get wet" and what happens when you try to put it in a waterproof box without destroying its precision advantage.
Why quantum sensing and quantum computing will diverge in their adoption paths: A drone operator doesn't need to know the…
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Superconducting Qubits, STAR Architecture, and Diamond-Spin Qubits with Dr. Shintaro Sato
5 oktober 2026 · 41 min
Dr. Shintaro Sato is a Fellow and Head of the Quantum Laboratory at Fujitsu Research, and Deputy Director of the RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Centre. He oversees Fujitsu's entire quantum effort — from device fabrication through error correction architecture, software, and application research — and has been building toward commercial quantum systems since Fujitsu began its serious quantum R&D push around 2020. With over 164 publications spanning graphene nanoelectronics, superconducting qubit design, and fault-tolerant architectures, he brings both deep technical credibility and a rare full-stack perspective. Lees meer
This conversation is timely because two significant developments converged almost simultaneously just before recording: Fujitsu announced a tin-vacancy (SnV) diamond-spin prototype developed with TU Delft and QuTech, and began testing its STAR error-correction architecture on neutral-atom hardware with startup Yaqumo — an explicit signal that Fujitsu is betting on hardware-agnostic software layers even as it races to scale its own superconducting devices. Listeners who follow quantum hardware roadmaps, fault-tolerant computing, or Japan's national quantum strategy will find this episode unusually specific and candid.
What We Get Into
How Fujitsu actually fabricates its superconducting chips — Sato explains how the team adapted Nakamura-sensei's original RIKEN designs, developed their own Josephson junction uniformity techniques, and built a research fab capability from scratch rather than licensing finished devices.
Why packaging is the hardest problem at 1,000+ qubits — not the qubits themselves, but the superconducting wiring, chip-to-chip interconnects, interposers, and the sheer number of control lines running from room temperature to millikelvin. Sato is candid that his engineers "don't want to do it anymore."
What STAR architecture actually does — it's not a new error-correction code; it operates at the logical gate layer above the surface code, …
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Quantum Venture Investing from the Lab to the Market with Marie Lepske
28 september 2026 · 41 min
Marie Lepske brings a combination that's genuinely rare in venture: a background in applied mathematics and physics, early experience covering quantum at Runa Capital before most generalist funds knew the field existed, and now a GP seat at Constructor Capital, which closed a $110M Fund I in February 2026 with more than half its capital directed toward next-generation computing including quantum. She backed Qnami at Runa — a quantum sensing company acquired by Quantum Design in June 2026, one of the few clean sensing exits the field has produced — and Constructor's portfolio includes QuEra, which raised over $230M in a round led by Google Quantum AI and SoftBank. Lees meer
The conversation matters now because the quantum investment landscape is genuinely changing. SPAC activity, mega-rounds from hyperscalers, and rising valuations are pulling in non-specialist capital at the same time that the science is getting harder to evaluate from the outside. Lepske is one of the people who has to navigate that tension every day, and she's willing to name the failure modes.
Founders building quantum or deep-tech companies, investors trying to understand where specialist and generalist capital intersect, and technically curious listeners who want to understand how the business side of quantum actually works will all find this episode useful.
What We Get Into
Why technical training matters at the earliest stages — and what it actually buys you when a founding team's only asset is a laboratory and an optical table, before there's even a legal entity
How the specialist-versus-generalist divide is evolving — Lepske's 2022 argument that early-stage quantum would stay specialist territory, and how she reads the arrival of Google, SoftBank, and NVIDIA in QuEra's cap table
The due diligence framework for pre-product science startups — team provenance, patent landscape, IP legal review, and how Constructor uses its scientific advisory board to validate founders they can't fully assess inte…
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Rational Quantum Mechanics and the Qubit Ceiling with Tim Palmer
21 september 2026 · 47 min
Tim Palmer is not a quantum computing skeptic from the outside. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a CBE, an IPCC lead author, and the inventor of probabilistic ensemble forecasting — techniques now used in every major weather prediction center on Earth. He did his PhD in general relativity under Roger Penrose. When someone with that profile publishes a peer-reviewed paper in PNAS arguing that the entire fault-tolerant quantum computing roadmap may rest on a mathematical assumption that is subtly and profoundly wrong, it is worth paying close attention. Lees meer
The timing matters. The quantum computing industry is spending billions on the assumption that standard quantum mechanics scales indefinitely — that if you can build enough error-corrected qubits, Shor's algorithm will eventually factor RSA-2048. Palmer's RaQM framework, reviewed by leading quantum foundations researchers including Lucien Hardy and Nicolas Gisin, makes a concrete, falsifiable prediction that this assumption will fail somewhere between 200 and 1,000 error-corrected qubits. That falsification window is opening right now. This episode is for anyone who cares about the foundations of quantum mechanics, the long-term viability of fault-tolerant quantum computing, or the rare pleasure of watching a serious scientist put a real stake in the ground.
What We Get Into
Why Palmer left general relativity and came back to quantum foundations decades later — the conceptual thread connecting chaos theory, climate forecasting, and the geometry of quantum state space
What Rational Quantum Mechanics actually proposes — specifically, why Palmer argues that Hilbert space should be defined over rational numbers rather than the full continuum of complex numbers, and what that means physically
The information-theoretic argument for a qubit ceiling — why, in RaQM, the information content of n entangled qubits grows linearly with n rather than exponentially, and why that creates a hard conflict with the quantum Fouri…
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Classical Reversible Computing on Quantum Dots with Daniel Loss
14 september 2026 · 49 min
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. Lees meer
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: T…
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Quantum-Inspired AI and Tensor Network Compression with Román Orús
7 september 2026 · 41 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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Quantum Workforce Intelligence from qubitsok.com with Piotr Lewandowski
31 augustus 2026 · 46 min
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. Lees meer
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…
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Quantum Risk, Readiness, and the Enterprise Boardroom with Richard Entrup
24 augustus 2026 · 36 min
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. Lees meer
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 framew…
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Silicon Spin Qubits and the IBM–HRL Acquisition with Thaddeus D. Ladd
17 augustus 2026 · 44 min
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. Lees meer
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 acq…
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Quantum in the Big Four with Aaron Kemp
10 augustus 2026 · 44 min
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. Lees meer
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 A…
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Investing in the Quantum Frontier and the Road to Fault Tolerance with Barak Bussel
4 augustus 2026 · 40 min
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. Lees meer
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 startup…
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Building the U.S. Quantum Supply Chain with Kate Timmerman
27 juli 2026 · 42 min
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. Lees meer
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, emp…
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The Open Source Substrate for Quantum with Ben Castanon
20 juli 2026 · 44 min
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. Lees meer
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 su…
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Quantum Cameras and Sub-Diffraction Imaging with Johannes Galatsanos
13 juli 2026 · 49 min
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. Lees meer
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 h…
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Episode 100: Live at Barnes & Thornburg — Reflections on the First 100 Episodes
6 juli 2026 · 1 uur 20 min
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. Lees meer
The conversation is structured as a celebration and an examination: what has Sebastian actually learned by sitting with nearly 100 physicists, engineers, founders, and policymakers? How has the field changed since that first visit to TJ Watson in 2017? What do regional hubs like the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and Quebec's DistriQ tell us about what it takes to move from science to industry? And what does the next era demand — not just from researchers and companies, but from everyone?
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What You'll Learn
Why the Helgoland documentary matters: in June 2025, Sebastian and his wife traveled to the island where Heisenberg's 1925 insight gave birth to quantum mechanics, producing a documentary at a Yale–Max Planck centennial conference attended by multiple Nobel laureates — and what that experience distilled about the state of the field
How Sebastian's journey into quantum began: arriving at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in 2017 to help with Qiskit's open source strategy, encountering the 53-qubit milestone, and recognizing the earliest stages of an emerging technology that would become his life's work
What the "Heroic Age of Qubits" was — and why it ended: the period of genius PIs r…
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Quantum EDA for Ion Trap Design with Daniel Faircloth
29 juni 2026 · 39 min
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. Lees meer
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 prese…
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Electrons on Superfluid Helium with Nick Farina
22 juni 2026 · 42 min
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. Lees meer
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 superfl…
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Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco
15 juni 2026 · 45 min
Why This Episode Matters Lees meer
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 …
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Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures
8 juni 2026 · 46 min
Why This Episode Matters Lees meer
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
H…
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Quantum Book Launch with Yuval Boger
1 juni 2026 · 55 min
Why This Episode Matters Lees meer
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 ph…
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Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias Christandl
25 mei 2026 · 39 min
Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias Christandl Lees meer
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…
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Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull
18 mei 2026 · 42 min
Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull Lees meer
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 w…
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The Quantum Control Stack with Niels Bultink
11 mei 2026 · 37 min
Why This Episode Matters Lees meer
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 …
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Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy
4 mei 2026 · 38 min
Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy Lees meer
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 nominal…
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Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch
27 april 2026 · 45 min
Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch Lees meer
Ivan Deutsch is Distinguished Regents' Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico and the founding director of CQuIC, the Center for Quantum Information and Control. Along with his longtime collaborator Poul Jessen, Ivan helped lay the theoretical foundations for neutral-atom quantum computing in the 1990s: trapping individual atoms in optical lattices, cooling them to near absolute zero, and shuttling them in parallel to perform quantum logic. The companies commercializing those ideas today — QuEra, Pasqal, Atom Computing, Infleqtion, and the newly announced Aurora out of Caltech — are building on architectural concepts that trace directly to his group's early papers. His 9,600+ citations across quantum information, atomic physics, and quantum control place him among the most-cited theorists in the field.
The reason to talk to Ivan now is that he has been making a quietly heterodox argument: every one of those commercial platforms encodes information in two energy levels of an atom that has ten or sixteen, and Ivan thinks the field should be asking whether that's the right choice — not for information density, which is only a logarithmic gain, but for fault tolerance. This conversation goes deep on qudits, spin cat codes, and the co-design philosophy that has shaped Ivan's career at the interface between theory and experiment, ions and neutral atoms, and academia and industry. If you are following neutral-atom hardware, fault-tolerant quantum error correction, or the emergence of regional quantum ecosystems, this episode is essential.
What You'll Learn
Why neutral atoms were the "underdog cousins" of trapped ions — and the precise trade-off at the heart of a 30-year rivalry: ions are great and terrible because they're charged; neutral atoms are great and terrible because they're neutral
What the original neutral-atom quantum computing paper actually got right: the parallel a…
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Quantum Chemistry's Classical Limits with Garnet Chan
20 april 2026 · 41 min
Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, is joined on this episode by Garnet Chan, the Bren Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and among the most cited computational chemists in the world (34,000+ Google Scholar citations). Garnet is neither a quantum computing booster nor a dismissive skeptic. He's a theorist who works at the exact boundary between what classical algorithms can and cannot do — and who keeps finding that boundary further out than the quantum computing community has claimed. The FeMo-cofactor has been a flagship quantum computing use case for nearly a decade: a catalytic core of the enzyme that fixes atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, and a molecule widely described as "beyond classical reach." Chan's January 2026 paper challenges that framing directly. This conversation explains what was actually solved, what wasn't, and what it would genuinely take for quantum computers to contribute to the chemistry of nitrogen fixation. This episode is for researchers, engineers, and informed observers who want an honest, technically grounded view of where quantum computers genuinely help in chemistry — and where classical methods are more capable than the field has admitted. Lees meer
What You'll Learn
Why the FeMo-cofactor became one of the quantum computing community's favorite benchmark — and why the framing around energy savings from nitrogen fixation is less accurate than it sounds
What "chemical accuracy" (~1 kcal/mol) actually means as a precision target, and why hitting it classically undermines a decade of quantum resource estimates
Why real chemical systems are only "slightly entangled" — and what that means for the general argument that quantum computers are the natural tool for quantum chemistry
The difference between a problem being hard and a problem being exponentially hard — and why that distinction matters enormously for quantum advantage claims
Where the genuine classical wall might be: bridging 15 orders of ma…
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Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat
17 april 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat Lees meer
In this special live-streamed discussion, Will Zeng, co-founder of the Unitary Foundation, and Ziyaad Bhorat, VP at the Mozilla Foundation, join host Sebastian Hassinger to unpack their co-authored white paper, The Open Foundation Quantum Technology Needs. The paper argues that open source quantum software is structurally underfunded — too applied for academic grants, too public-good for venture capital — and that philanthropic organizations need to step in before the window closes.
This conversation arrives at a pivotal moment. Google recently published a paper showing Shor's algorithm could break ECDLP-256 with roughly 500,000 physical qubits — a 20x improvement over prior estimates — while Oratomic launched claiming 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits may be sufficient for cryptographically relevant computation. The timelines are compressing. The question is whether the software ecosystem can keep pace with the hardware.
The video of our conversation can be viewed on YouTube.What you'll learn
Why open source quantum software falls into a structural funding gap between academic grants and venture capital — and what that means for the field's trajectory
How Mozilla Foundation evaluates emerging technology fields for philanthropic intervention, and what specifically convinced them quantum was ripe for engagement
What Google's 20x efficiency gain for Shor's algorithm and the Oratomic launch mean for Q-Day timelines and post-quantum migration urgency
Why the "quantum Linux" analogy is useful but incomplete — and what the real risk is (fragmentation, not monopoly)
How Unitary Foundation's microgrant program ($4,000, six months) has become a faster on-ramp to quantum careers than traditional academic pathways
What PyMatching, PyZX, and other microgrant-funded projects reveal about the scalability of small open source investments
Why open source benchmarking through Metriq Gym matters — and why vendor-drive…
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Simulating Quantum Materials with Arnab Banerjee
7 april 2026 · 40 min
Summary Lees meer
This episode is for anyone following the quantum utility debate or curious about how quantum computers will actually contribute to scientific discovery. Arnab Banerjee — assistant professor at Purdue, guest scientist at Oak Ridge's Quantum Science Center, and one of the most-cited experimentalists working at the intersection of quantum materials and quantum computing — walks us through his career-spanning journey from growing magnetic crystals to programming qubits.
You'll hear how Banerjee's frustration with classical tools that couldn't explain his own experimental data drove him to quantum computing, why a quantum spin liquid is like the vortex that forms when you throw a stone into water, and how his team used 50 qubits on IBM's Heron chip to reproduce the spectroscopic fingerprint of a real material — KCuF3 — matching data collected at Oak Ridge and the UK's ISIS neutron source. He also offers a nuanced assessment of where different quantum computing platforms excel, drawing on hands-on experience with IBM, QuEra, and D-Wave.
What you'll learn
What a quantum spin liquid actually is and why its collective behavior — like vortices on water — could enable naturally error-protected qubits
How neutron scattering works as a quantum probe — using the neutron's own spin and de Broglie wavelength to reveal both atomic positions and energy levels simultaneously
Why Banerjee's team chose to benchmark quantum simulation against known experimental data first before tackling classically intractable problems
What the IBM Heron benchmarking paper actually showed — reproducing spinon excitations in KCuF3, a one-dimensional Heisenberg chain, with quantitative agreement to neutron data
How different quantum computing modalities serve different materials science problems — IBM for fast, cheap operations on 2D lattices; trapped ions for all-to-all connectivity; D-Wave and QuEra for Ising-like Hamiltonians
How close we are to quantum advantage in materials simulati…
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Quantum Advantage Achieved with Dominik Hangleiter
1 april 2026 · 37 min
Has quantum advantage actually been achieved — or is the field still arguing over its own milestones? Dominik Hangleiter, one of the leading theorists working on quantum computational advantage, joins the podcast to make the case that it has, explain why so many physicists remain unconvinced, and map the path toward fault-tolerant, verifiable quantum advantage. Lees meer
Why This Episode Matters
If you follow quantum computing and want to cut through the noise around quantum advantage claims, this episode is for you. Dominik Hangleiter — an Ambizione Fellow at ETH Zürich and postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley's Simons Institute — has spent over a decade studying the boundary between what quantum and classical computers can do. His March 2026 paper "Has quantum advantage been achieved?" synthesizes years of experiments, classical simulation attacks, and complexity theory into a clear-eyed assessment. Whether you're an experimentalist, a theorist, or simply quantum-curious, you'll come away with a sharper understanding of what's been demonstrated, what hasn't, and what comes next.
What You'll Learn
Why random circuit sampling became the primary arena for proving quantum advantage — and why the task's "uselessness" is a feature, not a bug
How the linear cross-entropy benchmark (XEB) works as a statistical proxy for verifying classically intractable quantum computation
Why audiences of physicists are still split on whether quantum advantage has been demonstrated, despite multiple experiments since 2019
What "peaked circuits" are and how they interpolate between random sampling and structured computation
How post-quantum cryptography (learning with errors) exploits problems that quantum computers can't solve — and what that reveals about quantum computation's limits
Why basic arithmetic is surprisingly hard for fault-tolerant quantum computers, and how that bottlenecks algorithms like Shor's
How fault-tolerant compilation co-designs quantum circuits with error-correctin…
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Scaling Quantum Hardware Like Semiconductors with Matthijs Rijlaarsdam
23 maart 2026 · 37 min
Scaling Quantum Hardware Like Semiconductors with Matthijs Rijlaarsdam Lees meer
The quantum computing industry has been stuck at roughly 100 qubits for years — not because of physics, but because of wiring. Matthijs Rijlaarsdam, co-founder and CEO of QuantWare, explains how his company's 3D vertical chip architecture (VIO) could break through that ceiling to 10,000 qubits by 2028, and why the quantum industry needs to start thinking like the semiconductor industry if it wants to actually deliver on its promises.
Episode Summary
This conversation is for anyone trying to understand why quantum computers haven't scaled as fast as promised — and what it would take to change that. Matthijs brings an unusual perspective as a computer scientist (not a physicist) who co-founded QuantWare out of TU Delft's QuTech to become the world's first commercial supplier of superconducting quantum processors.
Rather than building a full quantum computer, QuantWare sells QPUs as components — the "TSMC of quantum." In this episode, Matthijs walks through the VIO architecture that routes signals vertically through stacked chiplets instead of along chip edges, why specialization and volume economics are the only realistic path to useful quantum computing, and how the Dutch quantum ecosystem punches far above its weight thanks to consistent long-term investment.
What You'll Learn
Why the quantum industry is stuck at ~100 qubits — and how 90% of current chip area is consumed by signal routing, not qubits, creating a fundamental scaling wall
How VIO's 3D chiplet architecture breaks the wiring bottleneck by routing signals vertically through stacked silicon modules, enabling 10,000-qubit processors that are physically smaller than today's 100-qubit chips
Why quantum computing will be heterogeneous — different platforms (superconducting, trapped ions, neutral atoms) have different trade-offs analogous to CPUs vs. memory vs. storage in classical computing
The economics that make specialization …
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Engineering the Quantum Future with Brian Gaucher
16 maart 2026 · 40 min
Ever wonder why quantum computing still feels like a "cool science experiment" instead of a deployable technology? After two decades building wireless standards and quantum systems at IBM, Brian Gaucher argues that engineering—not physics—has become the critical bottleneck holding back quantum technologies from real-world impact. Lees meer
Why this episode matters
This conversation is essential for anyone trying to understand why quantum technologies haven't yet transitioned from laboratory demonstrations to scalable industrial applications. Brian co-authored the recent ERVA report that identifies the specific engineering challenges blocking quantum progress across computing, sensing, and biological applications. If you're a researcher, engineer, or technology leader wondering how quantum moves from promising science to transformational technology, this episode provides the roadmap.
The discussion reveals why materials engineering, not theoretical breakthroughs, will determine which nations lead the quantum economy—and why coordinated investment in nanoscale manufacturing infrastructure needs to happen now, before manufacturing ecosystems become geographically concentrated like semiconductors.
What you'll learn
How engineering precision has replaced theoretical understanding as the primary quantum bottleneck across computing, sensing, and biological applications
Why superconducting qubit fabrication still resembles lab experiments despite being labeled an "engineering problem" since 2016—and what's needed to achieve semiconductor-level reproducibility
The specific materials challenges blocking quantum scaling: surface and interface noise control, defect management, cryogenic packaging, and atomic-layer precision manufacturing
Why quantum computing will require hundreds of interconnected dilution refrigerators rather than single large systems, and the engineering implications of distributed quantum architectures
How AI and quantum computing create bidirectional accel…
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Quantum Engineering with David Reilly and Tom Ohki
9 maart 2026 · 49 min
Revolutionary Quantum Engineering with David Reilly and Tom Ohki Lees meer
Have you ever wondered what it takes to build computing systems that work at temperatures colder than outer space? David Reilly and Tom Ohki are tackling this exact challenge, leading a "special ops" team of engineers from their unique position at Emergence Quantum—the startup born from Microsoft's Station Q program. They're not just building quantum computers; they're creating the entire infrastructure ecosystem that will make scalable quantum computing possible.
Episode Summary
This episode explores how quantum computing's most challenging engineering problems are being solved from the ground up. David Reilly (former Station Q lead) and Tom Ohki (ex-Raytheon BBN Technologies) share their journey from academic research to building Emergence Quantum—a company focused on the systems-level challenges of quantum computing and beyond.
Unlike typical quantum startups racing to build better qubits, Emergence takes a "qubit-agnostic" approach, focusing on the critical control systems, cryogenic electronics, and infrastructure needed to scale any quantum platform. Their work spans from cryo-CMOS control systems that operate at millikelvin temperatures to revolutionary applications of cryogenic cooling in classical data centers.
What You'll Learn
How cryo-CMOS technology solves the fundamental wiring bottleneck that prevents quantum computers from scaling beyond hundreds of qubits
Why the "special ops" team model enables breakthrough engineering when tackling unprecedented technical challenges across quantum and classical computing
How cryogenic cooling could transform classical data centers by dramatically reducing power consumption and improving processor performance
The systems-level thinking required to build quantum computers that actually work at scale, beyond just improving individual qubit performance
Why Australia offers unique advantages for deep tech R&D companies focused on long-term hard…
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The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson
2 maart 2026 · 40 min
From Steel Mills to Quantum Scale-Up: Inside Illinois's Bold Bet on the Future of Computing Lees meer
What does it take to build the world's largest dedicated quantum technology park — on the site of a former steel mill? Harley Johnson is leading that effort, and the answer involves equal parts materials science, economic development, and a 30-year bet on quantum that's finally paying off.
Why This Episode Matters
If you're following the quantum computing industry's path from lab prototypes to commercial-scale systems, this episode maps the terrain. Harley Johnson — a computational materials scientist turned CEO of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) — explains how Illinois assembled a unique combination of federal research funding, state economic investment, national labs, and top-tier universities into a 128-acre technology park designed to solve the quantum industry's hardest problem: scaling up.
Whether you're a researcher, a founder, a policymaker, or someone trying to understand where quantum jobs and applications are actually headed, this conversation lays out how one state is building the infrastructure — physical, institutional, and human — to make large-scale quantum computing real.
What You'll Learn
How a 1994 bet on quantum mechanics in a mechanical engineering lab led to directing the largest dedicated quantum tech park in the world
Why Illinois chose a "beyond silicon" strategy for the CHIPS and Science Act — and how landing 4 of the first 10 federal quantum centers positioned the state for what came next
How IQMP's public-private governance model works: a university-governed LLC partnering with private developers, accountable to the public while incentivizing industry
Why the park deliberately hosts a diverse portfolio of hardware modalities — including PsiQuantum, IBM, Inflection, Dirac, and Pascal — and how that mirrors venture portfolio thinking
How IQMP's algorithm center connects quantum hardware companies with Fortune 500 end …
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Quantum LDPC error correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster
26 februari 2026 · 38 min
Breaking Down RSA: How QLDPC Codes Cut Quantum Computing Requirements by an Order of Magnitude Lees meer
What if I told you that the number of qubits needed to break RSA encryption just dropped from over a million to around 100,000? That's exactly what researchers at Iceberg Quantum achieved by combining quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) error correction with algorithmic optimizations—potentially accelerating quantum cryptography timelines by years.
Why this episode matters
This episode dives into groundbreaking research that could reshape quantum computing's practical timeline. We explore how QLDPC codes overcome the physical constraints of surface codes, why hardware diversity is driving new error correction approaches, and what this means for the race toward cryptographically relevant quantum computers.
Perfect for quantum researchers, cryptography professionals, and anyone curious about the engineering challenges between today's quantum devices and tomorrow's code-breaking machines.
What you'll learn
Why QLDPC codes outperform surface codes — How throwing out nearest-neighbor connectivity assumptions unlocks better physical-to-logical qubit ratios across multiple hardware platforms
The algorithmic tricks that matter — How shared register reads and parallelization techniques can dramatically reduce runtime on slower quantum hardware platforms like trapped ions and neutral atoms
What "hardware agnostic" really means — Why developing error correction methods that work across superconducting, trapped ion, photonic, and neutral atom platforms is crucial for the quantum ecosystem
How generalized ladder surgery enables logical operations — The breakthrough that made QLDPC codes viable for full quantum computation, not just quantum memory storage
Why decoding remains the bottleneck — The real-time classical computation challenges that still need solving to make fault-tolerant quantum computing practical
The business model emerging around quantum architecture — …
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Our Quantum Future with Evan Kubes
23 februari 2026 · 38 min
How a Lawyer and a Listicle Launched One of Quantum's Most Influential Media Platforms Lees meer
Evan Kubes had no physics degree, no engineering background, and no idea what a qubit was when he stumbled across a press release about AWS investing in quantum. What he did have was experience translating complex industries for mainstream audiences — and within months, he and co-founder Alex Challans had turned a Wix website and a "Top 20 Most Influential People in Quantum" listicle into The Quantum Insider, now one of the industry's leading media and intelligence platforms. In this episode, Evan shares how that scrappy start grew into Resonance, a multi-vertical deep tech media company — and why he spent the last year making Our Quantum Future, a feature-length documentary premiering at APS March Meeting that aims to bring quantum out of the echo chamber and onto your screen.
Why this episode matters
This episode marks a new chapter for The New Quantum Era. In the intro, Sebastian shares some big updates — going fully independent, new media projects including the Helgoland 2025 documentary, a newsletter, and broader efforts to build a more accessible and equitable quantum technology ecosystem through open source and open standards. He also announces his new role as a Fellow at the Unitary Foundation. Read the full blog post: A New Chapter.
The conversation with Evan Kubes is a perfect fit for this moment. Evan sits at the intersection of quantum's technical community and the broader world trying to make sense of it — a translator between physicists and the public. His story illuminates something the industry rarely discusses: how do you actually build awareness, trust, and market understanding for a technology most people can't explain?
The documentary Our Quantum Future, produced for the International Year of Quantum and featuring Nobel laureates, a former CIA officer, and the leaders of Google, Microsoft, and IonQ, is designed for exactly that audience — the curious non-…
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Building a Quantum Ecosystem from Scratch with Martin Laforest
17 februari 2026 · 42 min
What does it take to build a thriving quantum ecosystem from the ground up? Martin Laforest, physicist-turned-venture-capitalist at Quantacet, reveals how Quebec transformed a 1970s academic bet into a $400M quantum powerhouse—and why the industry's biggest misconception is thinking quantum computing is either a science problem or an engineering problem when it's clearly both. Lees meer
Summary
In this conversation, Sebastian sits down with Martin Laforest, partner at Quantacet, Canada's quantum-only VC fund, to explore the messy realities of building quantum companies and ecosystems. Martin brings a rare perspective: PhD from Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing, eight years leading scientific outreach, a stint building a post-quantum cryptography startup with ex-BlackBerry executives, and now investing in the quantum future.This episode is for anyone trying to understand how quantum technology actually gets built—not the hype, but the infrastructure, the collaboration models, the government investment strategies, and the patience required. Whether you're technical or just curious about how transformative technologies emerge, Martin offers a grounded view of what's working, what's not, and why the quantum revolution looks more like slow, deliberate ecosystem building than overnight breakthroughs.
What You'll Learn
Why quantum is both a science and engineering challenge and how the vacuum tube-to-transistor transition illuminates today's quantum journey
How Quebec built a world-class quantum ecosystem starting from a 1970s university bet on condensed matter physics through to today's $400M provincial investment
The infrastructure that matters: why Sherbrooke's six shared dilution fridges and quantum communication testbed represent a different collaboration model
What VCs actually look for in quantum startups beyond the technology—and why Martin believes early-stage investing is about building great companies, not just returns
The three most dangerous misconcep…
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Quantum consciousness with Joachim Keppler
9 februari 2026 · 37 min
What if consciousness isn’t generated by the brain, but emerges from its interaction with a ubiquitous quantum field? In this episode, Sebastian Hassinger and theoretical physicist Joachim Keppler explore a zero‑point field model of consciousness that could reshape both neuroscience and quantum theory. Lees meer
Summary
This conversation is for anyone curious about the “hard problem” of consciousness, quantum brain theories, and the future of quantum biology and AI. Joachim shares his QED‑based framework where the brain couples to the electromagnetic zero‑point field via glutamate, producing macroscopic quantum effects that correlate with conscious states. You’ll hear how this model connects existing neurophysiology, testable predictions, and deep questions in philosophy of mind.What You’ll Learn
How a quantum field theorist ended up founding an institute for the scientific study of consciousness and building a rigorous, physics‑grounded framework for it.
Why consciousness may hinge on a universal principle: the brain’s resonant coupling to the electromagnetic zero‑point field, not just classical neural firing.
What macroscopic quantum phenomena in the brain look like, including coherence domains, self‑organized criticality, and long‑range synchronized activity patterns linked to conscious states.
How glutamate, the brain’s most abundant neurotransmitter, could act as the molecular interface to the zero‑point field inside cortical microcolumns.
Which concrete experiments could confirm or falsify this theory, from detecting macroscopic quantum coherence in neurotransmitter molecules to measuring glutamate‑driven biophoton emissions with a specific quantum “fingerprint.”
Why Joachim sees the zero‑point field as a dual‑aspect “psychophysical” field and how that reframes classic philosophy‑of‑mind debates about qualia and the nature of awareness.
What this perspective implies for artificial consciousness and whether future quantum computers or engineered systems might …
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Quantum Leadership with Nadya Mason
2 februari 2026 · 46 min
What happens when a former elite gymnast with “weak math and science” becomes dean of one of the world’s most influential quantum engineering schools? In this episode of *The New Quantum Era*, Sebastian Hassinger talks with Prof. Nadya Mason about quantum 2.0, building a regional quantum ecosystem, and why she sees leadership as a way to serve and build community rather than accumulate power. Lees meer
Summary
This conversation is for anyone curious about how quantum materials research, academic leadership, and large‑scale public investment are shaping the next phase of quantum technology. You’ll hear how Nadya’s path from AT&T Bell Labs to dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at UChicago informs her service‑oriented approach to leadership and ecosystem building. The discussion spans superconducting devices, Chicago’s quantum hub strategy, and what it will actually take to build a diverse, job‑ready quantum workforce in time for the coming wave of applications.What You’ll Learn
How a non‑linear path (elite sports, catching up in math, early lab work) can lead to a career at the center of quantum science and engineering.
Why condensed matter and quantum materials are the quiet “bottleneck” for scalable quantum computing, networking, and transduction technologies.
How superconducting junctions, Andreev bound states, and hybrid devices underpin today’s superconducting qubits and topological quantum efforts.
The difference between “quantum 1.0” (lasers, GPS, nuclear power, semiconductors) and “quantum 2.0” focused on sensing, communication, and computation.
How the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Chicago Quantum Exchange are deliberately knitting together universities, national labs, industry, and state funding into a cohesive quantum cluster.
Why Nadya frames leadership as building communities around science and opportunity, and what that means in a faculty‑driven environment where “nobody works for the dean.”
Concrete ways Illinois an…
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Democratizing Quantum Venture Investing with Chris Sklarin
26 januari 2026 · 33 min
Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, talks with Alumni Ventures managing partner Chris Sklarin about how one of the most active US venture firms is building a quantum portfolio while “democratizing” access to VC as an asset class for individual investors. They dig into Alumni Ventures’ co‑investor model, how the firm thinks about quantum hardware, software, and sensing, and why quantum should be viewed as a long‑term platform with near‑term pockets of commercial value. Chris also explains how accredited investors can start seeing quantum deal flow through Alumni Ventures’ syndicate. Lees meer
Chris’ background and Alumni Ventures in a nutshell
Chris is an MIT‑trained engineer who spent years in software startups before moving into venture more than 20 years ago.
Alumni Ventures is a roughly decade‑old firm focused on “democratizing venture capital” for individual investors, with over 11,000 LPs, more than 1.5 billion dollars raised, and about 1,300 active portfolio companies.
The firm has been repeatedly recognized as a highly active VC by CB Insights, PitchBook, Stanford GSB, and Time magazine.
How Alumni Ventures structures access for individuals
Most investors come in as individuals into LLC‑structured funds rather than traditional GP/LP funds.
Alumni Ventures always co‑invests alongside a lead VC, using the lead’s conviction, sector expertise, and diligence as a key signal.
The platform also offers a syndicate where accredited investors can opt in to see and back individual deals, including those tagged for quantum.
Quantum in the Alumni Ventures portfolio
Alumni Ventures has 5–6 quantum‑related investments spanning hardware, software, and applications, including Rigetti, Atom Computing, Q‑CTRL, Classiq, and quantum‑error‑mitigation startup Qedma/Cadmus.
Rigetti was one of the firm’s earliest quantum investments; the team followed on across multiple rounds and was able to return capital to investors after Rigetti’s SPAC and a strong period in the public markets.
C…
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Regional quantum development with Alejandra Y. Castillo
19 januari 2026 · 32 min
Alejandra Y. Castillo, former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development and now Chancellor Senior Fellow for Economic Development at Purdue University Northwest, joins your host, Sebastian Hassinger, to discuss how quantum technologies can drive inclusive regional economic growth and workforce development. She shares lessons from federal policy, Midwest tech hubs, and cross-state coalitions working to turn quantum from lab research into broad-based opportunity. Lees meer
Themes and key insights
Quantum as near-term and multi-faceted: Castillo pushes back on the idea that quantum is distant, emphasizing that computing, sensing, and communications are already maturing and attracting serious investment from traditional industries like biopharma.
From federal de-risking to regional ecosystems: She describes the federal role as de-risking early innovation through programs under the CHIPS and Science Act while stressing that long-term success depends on regional coalitions across states, universities, industry, philanthropy, and local government.
Inclusive workforce and supply-chain planning: Castillo argues that “quantum workforce” must go beyond PhDs to include a mapped ecosystem of jobs, skills, suppliers, housing, and infrastructure so that local communities see quantum as opportunity, not displacement.
National security, urgency, and inclusion: She frames sustained quantum investment as both an economic and national security imperative, warning that inconsistent U.S. funding risks falling behind foreign competitors while also noting that private capital alone may ignore inclusion and regional equity.
Notable quotes
“We either focus on the urgency or we’re going to have to focus on the emergency.”
“No one state is going to do this… This is a regional play that we will be called to answer for the sake of a national security play as well.”
“We want to make sure that entire regions can actually reposition themselves from an economic perspective, so that pe…
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Majorana qubits with Chetan Nayak
12 januari 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
In this episode of The New Quantum Era, your host Sebastian Hassinger is joined by Chetan Nayak, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, professor of physics at the University of California Santa Barbara, and driving force behind Microsoft's quantum hardware R&D program. They discuss a modality of qubit that has not been covered on the podcast before, based on Majorana fermonic behaviors, which have the promise of providing topological protection against the errors which are such a challenge to quantum computing. Lees meer
Guest Bio
Chetan Nayak is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and leads the company’s topological quantum hardware program, including the Majorana‑1 processor based on Majorana‑zero‑mode qubits.
He is also a professor of physics at UCSB and a leading theorist in topological phases of matter, non‑Abelian anyons, and topological quantum computation.
Chetan co‑founded Microsoft’s Station Q in 2005, building a bridge from theoretical proposals for topological qubits to engineered semiconductor–superconductor devices.
What we talk about
Chetan’s first exposure to quantum computing in Peter Shor’s lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study, and how that intersected with his PhD work with Frank Wilczek on non‑Abelian topological phases and Majorana zero modes.
The early days of topological quantum computation: fractional quantum Hall states at , emergent quasiparticles, and the realization that braiding these excitations naturally implements Clifford gates.
How Alexei Kitaev’s toric‑code and Majorana‑chain ideas connected abstract topology to concrete condensed‑matter systems, and led to Chetan’s collaboration with Michael Freedman and Sankar Das Sarma.
The 2005 proposal for a gallium‑arsenide quantum Hall device realizing a topological qubit, and the founding of Station Q to turn such theoretical blueprints into experimental devices in partnership with academic labs.
Why Microsoft pivoted from quantum Hall platforms to semiconductor–superconductor nanowires: leve…
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Peaked quantum circuits with Hrant Gharibyan
12 december 2025 · 30 min
In this episode of The New Quantum Era, Sebastian talks with Hrant Gharibyan, CEO and co‑founder of BlueQubit, about “peaked circuits” and the challenge of verifying quantum advantage. They unpack Scott Aaronson and Yuxuan Zhang’s original peaked‑circuit proposal, BlueQubit’s scalable implementation on real hardware, and a new public challenge that invites the community to attack their construction using the best classical algorithms available. Along the way, they explore how this line of work connects to cryptography, hardness assumptions, and the near‑term role of quantum devices as powerful scientific instruments. Lees meer
Topics Covered
Why verifying quantum advantage is hard The core problem: if a quantum device claims to solve a task that is classi-cally intractable, how can anyone check that it did the right thing? Random circuit sampling (as in Google’s 2019 “supremacy” experiment and follow‑on work from Google and Quantinuum) is believed to be classically hard to simulate, but the verification metrics (like cross‑entropy benchmarking) are themselves classically intractable at scale.
What are peaked circuits? Aaronson and Zhang’s idea: construct circuits that look like random circuits in every respect, but whose output distribution secretly has one special bit string with an anomalously high probability (the “peak”). The designer knows the secret bit string, so a quantum device can be verified by checking that measurement statistics visibly reveal the peak in a modest number of shots, while finding that same peak classically should be as hard as simulating a random circuit.
BlueQubit’s scalable construction and hardware demo BlueQubit extended the original 24‑qubit, simulator‑based peaked‑circuit construction to much larger sizes using new classical protocols. Hrant explains their protocol for building peaked circuits on Quantinuum’s H2 processor with around 56 qubits, thousands of gates, and effectively all‑to‑all connectivity, while still hiding a single secre…
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Diamond vacancies and scalable qubits with Quantum Brilliance
6 december 2025 · 37 min
Episode overview
This episode of The New Quantum Era features a conversation with Quantum Brilliance co‑founder and CEO Mark Luo and independent board chair Brian Wong about diamond nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers as a platform for both quantum computing and quantum sensing. The discussion covers how NV centers work, what makes diamond‑based qubits attractive at room temperature, and how to turn a lab technology into a scalable product and business. Lees meerWhat are diamond NV qubits?
Mark explains how nitrogen vacancy centers in synthetic diamond act as stable room‑temperature qubits, with a nitrogen atom adjacent to a missing carbon atom creating a spin system that can be initialized and read out optically or electronically. The rigidity and thermal properties of diamond remove the need for cryogenics, complex laser setups, and vacuum systems, enabling compact, low‑power quantum devices that can be deployed in standard environments.Quantum sensing to quantum computing
NV centers are already enabling ultra‑sensitive sensing, from nanoscale MRI and quantum microscopy to magnetometry for GPS‑free navigation and neurotech applications using diamond chips under growing brain cells. Mark and Brian frame sensing not as a hedge but as a volume driver that builds the diamond supply chain, pushes costs down, and lays the manufacturing groundwork for future quantum computing chips.Fabrication, scalability, and the value chain
A key theme is the shift from early “shotgun” vacancy placement in diamond to a semiconductor‑style, wafer‑like process with high‑purity material, lithography, characterization, and yield engineering. Brian characterizes Quantum Brilliance’s strategy as “lab to fab”: deciding where to sit in the value chain, leveraging the existing semiconductor ecosystem, and building a partner network rather than owning everything from chips to compilers.Devices, roadmaps, and hybrid nodes
Quantum Brilliance has deployed room‑temperature systems with a handful of physic… -
Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling with Nobel Laureate John Martinis
26 november 2025 · 49 min
Episode overview
John Martinis, Nobel laureate and former head of Google’s quantum hardware effort, joins Sebastian Hassinger on The New Quantum Era to trace the arc of superconducting quantum circuits—from the first demonstrations of macroscopic quantum tunneling in the 1980s to today’s push for wafer-scale, manufacturable qubit processors. The episode weaves together the physics of “synthetic atoms” built from Josephson junctions, the engineering mindset needed to turn them into reliable computers, and what it will take for fabrication to unlock true large-scale quantum systems. Lees meerGuest bio
John M. Martinis is a physicist whose experiments on superconducting circuits with John Clarke and Michel Devoret at UC Berkeley established that a macroscopic electrical circuit can exhibit quantum tunneling and discrete energy levels, work recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” He went on to lead the superconducting quantum computing effort at Google, where his team demonstrated large-scale, programmable transmon-based processors, and now heads Qolab (also referred to in the episode as CoLab), a startup focused on advanced fabrication and wafer-scale integration of superconducting qubits.Martinis’s career sits at the intersection of precision instrumentation and systems engineering, drawing on a scientific “family tree” that runs from Cambridge through John Clarke’s group at Berkeley, with strong theoretical influence from Michel Devoret and deep exposure to ion-trap work by Dave Wineland and Chris Monroe at NIST. Today his work emphasizes solving the hardest fabrication and wiring challenges—pursuing high-yield, monolithic, wafer-scale quantum processors that can ultimately host tens of thousands of reproducible qubits on a single 300 mm wafer.
Key topics
Macroscopic quantum tunneling on a chip: How Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis used a current-biased Jo…
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Trapped ions on the cloud with Thomas Monz from AQT
18 november 2025 · 36 min
Thomas Monz, CEO of AQT (Alpine Quantum Technologies), joins Sebastian Hassinger on The New Quantum Era to chart the evolution of ion-trap quantum computing — from the earliest breakthroughs in Innsbruck to the latest roll-outs in supercomputing centers and on the cloud. Drawing on a career that spans pioneering research and entrepreneurial grit, Thomas details how AQT is bridging the gap between academic innovation and practical, scalable systems for real-world users. The conversation traverses AQT’s trajectory from component supplier to systems integrator, how standard 19-inch racks and open APIs are making quantum computing accessible in Europe’s top HPC centers, what Thomas anticipates from AQT launching on Amazon Braket, a quantum computing service from AWS, and what it will take for quantum to deliver genuine economic value. Lees meer
Guest Bio
Thomas Monz is the CEO and co-founder of AQT. A physicist by training, his work has helped transform trapped-ion quantum computing from a fundamental research topic into a commercially viable technology. After formative stints in quantum networks, high-precision measurement, and hands-on engineering, Thomas launched AQT alongside Peter Zoller and Rainer Blatt to make robust, scalable quantum computers available far beyond the university lab. He continues to be deeply engaged in both hardware development and quantum error correction research, with AQT now deploying systems at EuroHPC centers and bringing devices to Amazon Braket.Key Topics
From research prototype to rack-ready: How the pain points converting lab experiments into user-friendly hardware led AQT to build its quantum computers in the same form factors and standards as classical infrastructure, making plug-and-play integration with the supercomputing world possible.
Hybrid quantum–HPC deployments: Why systems-level thinking and classic IT lessons (such as respecting 19-inch rack and power standards) have enabled AQT to place ion-trap quantum computers in Germany …
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Quantum Materials and Nano Fabrication with Javad Shabani
12 november 2025 · 34 min
Quantum Materials and Nano-Fabrication with Javad Shabani Lees meer
Guest: Dr. Javad Shabani is Professor of Physics at NYU, where he directs both the Center for Quantum Information Physics and the NYU Quantum Institute. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2011, followed by postdoctoral research at Harvard and UC Santa Barbara in collaboration with Microsoft Research. His research focuses on novel states of matter at superconductor-semiconductor interfaces, mesoscopic physics in low-dimensional systems, and quantum device development. He is an expert in molecular beam epitaxy growth of hybrid quantum materials and has made pioneering contributions to understanding fractional quantum Hall states and topological superconductivity.
Episode Overview
Professor Javad Shabani shares his journey from electrical engineering to the frontiers of quantum materials research, discussing his pioneering work on semiconductor-superconductor hybrid systems, topological qubits, and the development of scalable quantum device fabrication techniques. The conversation explores his current work at NYU, including breakthrough research on germanium-based Josephson junctions and the launch of the NYU Quantum Institute.
Key Topics Discussed
Early Career and Quantum Journey
Javad describes his unconventional path into quantum physics, beginning with a double major in electrical engineering and physics at Sharif University of Technology after discovering John Preskill's open quantum information textbook. His graduate work at Princeton focused on the quantum Hall effect, particularly investigating the enigmatic five-halves fractional quantum Hall state and its potential connection to non-abelian anyons.From Spin Qubits to Topological Quantum Computing
During his PhD, Javad worked with Jason Petta and Mansur Shayegan on early spin qubit experiments, experiencing firsthand the challenge of controlling single quantum dots. His postdoctoral work at Harvard with Charlie Marcus focused on sc… -
Incubating quantum innovation with Vijoy Pandey of Outshift by Cisco
31 oktober 2025 · 40 min
Vijoy Pandey joins Sebastian Hassinger for this episode of The New Quantum Era to discuss Cisco's ambitious vision for quantum networking—not as a far-future technology, but as infrastructure that solves real problems today. Leading Outshift by Cisco, their incubation group and Cisco Research, Vijoy explains how quantum networks are closer than quantum computers, why distributed quantum computing is the path to scale, and how entanglement-based protocols can tackle immediate classical challenges in security, synchronization, and coordination. The conversation spans from Vijoy's origin story building a Hindi chatbot in the late 1980s to Cisco's groundbreaking room-temperature quantum entanglement chip developed with UC Santa Barbara, and explores use cases from high-frequency trading to telescope array synchronization. Lees meer
Guest Bio
Vijoy Pandey is Senior Vice President at Outshift by Cisco, the company's internal incubation group, where he also leads Cisco Research and Cisco Developer Relations (DevNet). His career in computing began in high school building AI chatbots, eventually leading him through distributed systems and software engineering roles including time at Google. At Cisco, Vijoy oversees a portfolio spanning quantum networking, security, observability, and emerging technologies, operating at the intersection of research and product incubation within the company's Chief Strategy Office.Key Topics
From research to systems: How Cisco's quantum work is transitioning from physics research to systems engineering, focusing on operability, deployment, and practical applications rather than building quantum computers.
The distributed quantum computing vision: Cisco's North Star is building quantum network fabric that enables scale-out distributed quantum computing across heterogeneous QPU technologies (trapped ion, superconducting, etc.) within data centers and between them—making "the quantum network the solution" to quantum's scaling problem and classical comp…