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

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.

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 honest case for why a high-risk, high-reward approach makes sense even when the engineering challenges are severe, and what the broader field has already gained from Microsoft's pursuit of Majorana physics
• The DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative as an independent audit — why having DARPA's technical team on-site to evaluate Majorana 2 is meaningful, and how Tahan thinks about external validation as a feature rather than a threat
• Why Tahan now believes the next five years may equal the last thirty — his specific reasoning about how AI-accelerated science, the scale of capital flowing into computing infrastructure, and demonstrated quantum error correction have changed his sense of what's possible
• The "simplest quantum computer" argument — what Tahan was actually proposing in his 2024 arXiv preprint (written as a retrospective from 2040, presented at APS in a Doc Brown costume), and how the idea of using quantum computers to generate training data for classical models fits into a near-term business model
• What a quantum hardware makerspace actually is — the specific vision for the Maryland center's hands-on space, including dilution refrigerators, hardware from AMD, IQM, Quantum Motion, Fermilab's QICK tools, and a model Tahan hopes can be replicated and scaled
• Why the workforce gap is a hardware problem, not just a software one — and how Tahan's own path (his father was an HVAC technician at the Smithsonian who got him a high school internship in astrophysics) shapes his conviction that hands-on experience is how scientists and engineers are actually made
• Microsoft as a platform company — why Tahan frames Microsoft's quantum strategy as wanting the best computers for customers, full stop, which means partnering with and supporting other modalities, not just betting everything on topological qubits

Resources & Links

Guest Links

• Charles Tahan — Personal Site (tahan.com/charlie) — Papers archive, talks, and personal projects including Meqanic, a quantum iOS puzzle game designed to build intuition about quantum mechanics
• Charles Tahan — Wikipedia — Comprehensive career summary covering his PhD, government roles, and move to Microsoft Quantum
• UMD Physics — "Charles Tahan Brings His Research Expertise to Thriving UMD Quantum Enterprise" — UMD's announcement of Tahan's visiting research professor and special advisor roles

Papers & Articles

• arXiv:2412.18726 — "Opinion: The Simplest Quantum Computer," Charles Tahan (Dec. 2024) — The speculative preprint written as a retrospective from 2040 that Tahan discusses in the episode; argues for a minimalist path to useful quantum computing and for using quantum computers to train classical models
• Microsoft Quantum Blog — "Microsoft's Quantum Research Center Opens in Maryland" (Sept. 22, 2026) — Written by Tahan; the primary source on the new center, DARPA access to Majorana 2, and the workforce development mission
• Microsoft on the Issues — "Supporting American Leadership in Quantum Technology" (May 7, 2025) — Tahan's written testimony to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology; covers NQIA reauthorization and AI-quantum convergence
• An in-depth look at Tahan's perspective in his Nature paper Quantum meets capitalism: how to pair long-term bets on technology with commercial speed
• IAS Science, Technology & Social Values Lab — "Dr. Charles Tahan" (Jan. 7, 2026) — Summary of Tahan's December 2025 IAS lecture "Quantum Information Technology and Society from 2000 to 2040," including his "not imminent, but inevitable" framing
• Science News — "Microsoft's Quantum Chip Got an Upgrade. Critics Are Still Skeptical" (June 2, 2026) — Covers expert skepticism around the Majorana 2 chip and the X vs. Z measurement debate; useful context for understanding what DARPA's independent evaluation is actually testing
• Post Quantum — "Microsoft Majorana 2: 20-Second Qubits, Same Questions" (June 3, 2026) — Critical analysis of the Majorana 2 chip, including the scientific controversy around missing X-parity measurements
• HPCwire — "Charles Tahan Exits National Quantum Coordination Office" (March 13, 2024) — Tahan's farewell Director's Letter; useful for understanding his transition from government to industry

Organizations & Programs

• DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative — The program under which DARPA is independently evaluating Microsoft's Majorana 2 system; program overview and stage structure
• https://www.dar...

Michelle Simmons is the founder and CEO of Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) and a Scientia Professor at UNSW Sydney. She is one of the few people in the field who has simultaneously run a 200-person academic research centre, founded Australia's first vertically integrated quantum computing company, shaped how the community publishes its results (as inaugural editor-in-chief of npj Quantum Information), and influenced national quantum policy. That combination of roles gives her an unusually grounded view of what is actually hard — in the physics, in the manufacturing, and in the business.

The conversation is happening at a specific inflection point. SQC published two landmark Nature papers within ten weeks of each other in late 2025 and early 2026 — an 11-qubit silicon processor with two-qubit gate fidelities reaching 99.99%, and a 15,000-site analogue simulator demonstrating a metal-insulator transition. The company has advanced to Stage B of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program whose stated opening position is skepticism that fault-tolerant quantum computing is achievable by 2033. And SQC is now shipping an analog quantum AI chip to commercial customers. This episode is for anyone who wants to understand what silicon spin qubits actually are, why the donor-qubit approach is architecturally distinct from the CMOS-foundry approaches most competitors use, and what a credible long-range quantum roadmap looks like when it is grounded in manufacturing reality rather than theoretical aspiration.

What We Get Into

• Why qubit quality improves with scale in SQC's system — the physical intuition behind using phosphorus donor atoms as "nature's perfect qubit," and why minimizing interfaces is the key insight that separates this approach from gate-defined quantum dots
• The STM as a manufacturing tool, not just a microscope — how Simmons reframed the scanning tunneling microscope as the atomic-scale equivalent of an ASML stepper, and why 25 years of development now yields half a million registers in half a day at sub-nanometer precision
• What the 15,000-site analogue simulator actually demonstrated — the distinction between analogue simulation and gate-model computation, what a metal-insulator transition tells you about correlated quantum matter, and why this device is also a tool for validating the gate-model processor as it scales
• Six qubits per lead and all-to-all connectivity — how hyperfine frequency selection lets SQC address multiple nuclear spin qubits through a single electrical lead, and why that matters for error correction overhead
• The eight-stage roadmap, set in 2014, and how it has held up — Simmons mapped her milestones onto the 1947–1981 arc of classical semiconductor development; two of the three near-term milestones came in ahead of schedule
• DARPA QBI Stage B: what it validates and what it doesn't — why Simmons describes the program as "gold for a company" and how external scrutiny is forcing SQC to solve operating-environment questions earlier than planned
• Quantum reservoir computing as a near-term product — how SQC's analog AI chip is already in customers' hands, cutting one communications company's training time from three weeks to two days, and why this is a bridge to the fault-tolerant era rather than a detour from it
• Why you cannot outsource quantum manufacturing — Simmons's argument, drawn from decades of hands-on fabrication, that the teams who treated manufacturing as a commodity have paid a steep price
• The hype question, answered by someone who has lived it — as a journal editor, APS division chair, and company CEO, Simmons has a rare vantage point on where the field's communication problems actually originate
• What "fault tolerant" will need to mean in 2033 — and why the definition of that phrase is going to require as much parsing as the hardware milestone itself

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

• Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) — SQC's official site; the news feed covers all major 2025–2026 milestones including the DARPA Stage B announcement and commercial partnerships
• UNSW Staff Profile — Michelle Simmons — Academic profile with full publication list and institutional roles

Papers & Results

• Nature — "Large-scale analogue quantum simulation using atom dot arrays" (2026) — The primary paper on the 15,000-site Quantum Twins analogue simulator; the result discussed in the episode
• Nature — "An 11-qubit atom processor in silicon" (Dec 2025) — The primary paper on SQC's 11-qubit processor, demonstrating high-fidelity operation across two interconnected nuclear spin registers
• HPCwire — SQC Demonstrates High-Accuracy Grover’s Algorithm Execution Without Error Correction (Feb 2025) — SQC's announcement of its Grover’s algorithm results, published in Nature Nanotechnology
• The Quantum Insider — SQC Silicon Processor Scales Without Fidelity Loss (Dec 2025) — Analysis of the 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity result and what it means for the donor-qubit architecture
• Phys.org — Quantum Twins Simulator Unveils 15,000 Controllable Quantum Dots (Feb 2026) — Accessible summary of the analogue simulator paper for non-specialist readers

DARPA Program

• SQC — DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative Stage B Announcement — SQC's official release on advancing to QBI Stage B
• DARPA — QBI Stage B Selection — Official DARPA page listing the 11 Stage B participants

Context & Analysis

• Interesting Engineering — Michelle Simmons Interview (Dec 2025) — First-person interview on silicon qubits, commercial strategy, and the 2033 roadmap; useful companion reading to this episode
• postquantum.com — Silicon Quantum Computing Company Profile (2026) — Independent commercial and technical assessment of SQC's position in the competitive landscape

Key Quotes & Insights

"Nature's perfect qubit." Simmons's phrase for the phosphorus donor atom in silicon: the qubit state forms naturally when the atom is placed, without complex materials engineering, in an environment where the silicon matrix acts as the vacuum does for trapped ions.

"Every atom counts." SQC's company motto, and a literal description of their manufacturing philosophy — because they know the position and behavior of every atom in every device, every chip is a learning opportunity.

> "I've never really seen...

Corey Stambaugh is one of the few people in the quantum world who has worked at the bench, inside federal policy, and now as the operational lead of a major public-private ecosystem initiative. He came up as a precision measurement physicist at NIST, moved to the White House's National Quantum Coordination Office as a senior policy advisor, and now directs the Capital of Quantum — Maryland's statewide effort to translate decades of university research into a commercial quantum industry cluster anchored in the Discovery District at the University of Maryland.

This conversation was recorded at the close of the 2026 Quantum World Congress, a week in which Maryland opened the Microsoft Quantum Research Center, announced Riverlane's U.S. headquarters in the Discovery District, welcomed QuEra Computing into the building, and unveiled a new partnership with Paladin Capital Group. If you follow quantum economic development, workforce policy, or the question of which regions are actually building durable quantum infrastructure versus generating press releases, this episode gives you a rare inside view from someone threading all of it together.

What We Get Into

• How the Capital of Quantum actually came together — the decades of university research that preceded the January 2025 launch, and what it took to stand up a formal initiative on top of that foundation
• What "150,000 square feet and a fridge at 14 millikelvin" means in practice — the Discovery Center build-out, from Microsoft buying the building to pumping down their dilution refrigerator in under a year
• Why the tenant list spans almost every major hardware modality — IQM (superconducting), Quantum Motion (silicon CMOS), Microsoft (topological), IonQ (trapped ion), QuEra (neutral atom), and Riverlane (error correction software) are all in or adjacent to the same building, and whether that's strategy or circumstance
• The DARPA Capital Quantum Benchmarking Hub — Maryland is one of three states with a memorandum of agreement under DARPA's QBI program, and what that independent benchmarking infrastructure means for an ecosystem that also hosts the companies being evaluated
• Quantum sensing as the near-term economic story — why Stambaugh, a metrologist by training, sees sensing startups like Euclid (NV diamond magnetometers for semiconductor inspection) as having clearer market paths than computing or networking right now
• The Paladin Capital partnership and the DC venture gap — why the mid-Atlantic VC culture differs from the West Coast model and what the initiative is doing to change the capital formation picture
• Workforce development from Q12 to the makerspace — a classroom next to a working dilution refrigerator, high school students from across the street getting their first look at a cryostat, and the lineage from early NSF quantum education workshops to the UN International Year of Quantum
• How Stambaugh thinks about competing ecosystems — Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico — and why he frames them as complementary rather than adversarial, while still being clear about Maryland's competitive positioning

Resources & Links

Guest & Initiative

• Capital of Quantum — Official Site — Landing page with ecosystem overview, company roster, and initiative goals
• Capital of Quantum — About Page — Detailed breakdown of initiative assets including QLab, Quantum Startup Foundry, and DARPA Hub
• Corey Stambaugh — University of Maryland Innovation Gateway — Current institutional role and title
• Corey Stambaugh — Council on Competitiveness — Career arc from NIST physicist to OSTP policy advisor to Capital of Quantum Director

Key Announcements Referenced in This Episode

• Governor Moore — $1 Billion Capital of Quantum Initiative (May 2026) — Official press release on IonQ HQ expansion, state budget commitments, and initiative goals
• Governor Moore — Microsoft Discovery Center Ribbon-Cutting (Sept. 2026) — Announcement of the Microsoft Quantum Research Center opening and Riverlane U.S. HQ
• Nextgov/FCW — Maryland Governor Touts New Quantum Partnership with Paladin Capital (Sept. 2026) — Coverage of the Paladin Capital Group partnership announced during Quantum World Congress week
• DARPA — Capital Quantum Benchmarking Hub MOA (April 2025) — DARPA's official press release on the up-to-$100M matching agreement with Maryland under the QBI program
• Quantum Zeitgeist — QuEra Computing Expands to Maryland — Stambaugh quoted on QuEra's arrival and the neutral-atom platform joining the ecosystem
• Quantum Zeitgeist — Maryland Wins Riverlane's U.S. Headquarters (Sept. 2026) — Riverlane's decision to locate its U.S. HQ in the Discovery District
• Data Center Dynamics — IQM's U.S. Quantum Technology Center — IQM's April 2026 arrival in the Discovery District
• Capital of Quantum — Quantum Motion Welcome (June 2026) — U.K. silicon-qubit company establishing U.S. presence in the Discovery District

Background & Context

• Quantum Computing Report — The Geography of Quantum: What Maryland Is Actually Building — Timeline of Capital of Quantum milestones from January 2025 through September 2026; useful for understanding the pace of the initiative
• Maryland Today — Quantum Discovery Center Launch — UMD's own coverage of the 2026 Quantum World Congress and Discovery Center opening
• The Baltimore Banner — Is Maryland's Big Bet on Quantum Computing Paying Off? (Sept. 2026) — A more critical look at Maryland's quantum ambitions; useful counterpoint to the official narrative
• YouTube — Corey Stambaugh at Q2B25 Silicon Valley — Stambaugh's January 2026 talk on the Capital of Quantum Initiative; good primer before or after this episode

Key Quotes & Insights

"Tell me where a national lab is, I'll tell you where a physicist is, and I'll tell you where quantum is." — Stambaugh on why quantum clusters form where they do, and why the lineage from NIST, Sandia, and Argonne to today's startups is not accident...

Isabella Martinez sits at an unusual intersection in the quantum ecosystem: she's not primarily a hardware researcher or an algorithm theorist, but a practitioner who has to make quantum work in operational environments — for customers who have real missions, real constraints, and very little patience for technology that can't be deployed. Her team at Booz Allen spans quantum computing, quantum sensing, and post-quantum cryptography, which means she's watching all three of the field's major near-term vectors simultaneously.

This conversation was recorded at Quantum World Congress 2026, and it reflects the mood of that moment: sensing is on the cusp of real deployment, PQC migration is being driven by policy urgency, and quantum computing is still asking the question of when — but the "when" is getting more specific. If you work in quantum and care about how the technology actually crosses the gap from lab to mission, this episode is for you. It's also a genuinely useful listen for anyone thinking about quantum careers, workforce development, or how to build teams that can navigate a technology that doesn't yet have a playbook.

What We Get Into

• Why Isabella's biomedical engineering capstone — not a physics class — shaped her entire approach to quantum: The lesson wasn't about building a better device; it was about why a life-saving tool sat unused because no one had time to get trained on it.
• The four-stage commercialization arc she uses to frame quantum maturity: Solve for physics, then engineering, then business case, then operationalization — and why that last step is the one the field talks about least.
• What quantum sensing deployment actually looks like right now: Including a vivid example of a quantum PNT sensor that "can't get wet" and what happens when you try to put it in a waterproof box without destroying its precision advantage.
• Why quantum sensing and quantum computing will diverge in their adoption paths: A drone operator doesn't need to know their navigation data is quantum-derived. A quantum computing user, at least for now, probably does — and that changes everything about how you design for adoption.
• How Booz Allen's team discovered the wrong part of a drug discovery workflow was being targeted for quantum speedup: A computational biologist and chemist sat down with the physics team and revealed that the step everyone assumed was the bottleneck wasn't the bottleneck at all.
• Why Isabella actively recruits people with criminology degrees, economics backgrounds, and education startup experience onto a quantum team: And why she's more worried about the rise of pure quantum-only graduate programs than she is about the talent shortage.
• The AI parallel that's shaping how enterprise customers think about quantum timing: Customers who watched AI capabilities leap unexpectedly are now asking "when" instead of "what" — but they're also more willing to wait for the right moment rather than jump in early.
• Her honest read on NISQ-era value: Real scientific output is happening on today's devices, but the early 2030s are where she expects the first commercially meaningful fault-tolerant results to appear.
• What the quantum community risks losing as the field matures: The collaborative, cross-disciplinary spirit that has defined the early era — and why she thinks that spirit is actually a competitive asset worth protecting.

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Isabella Bello Martinez — InformationWeek Author Page — Bio and links to her published articles on quantum talent and PQC for enterprise audiences.
• Booz Allen Quantum Sciences & Technologies Capability Sheet — Overview of Booz Allen's quantum practice, where Isabella leads products and partnerships.

Articles by Isabella Martinez

• "5 Steps for Implementing the New Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards" — InformationWeek — Her practical framework for organizational PQC migration, including the cryptographic inventory problem discussed in this episode.
• "Leading in the Race for Quantum Talent" — InformationWeek — Her argument for building quantum literacy at every organizational level, not just hiring PhDs — a theme central to this conversation.
• "Can Quantum Supercharge AI?" — Velocity by Booz Allen — Co-authored piece on quantum machine learning applications in defense, health, and intelligence missions.

Context & Policy

• "Post-Quantum Cryptography, Explained" — Booz Allen Hamilton — Booz Allen explainer co-authored by Isabella's team; useful background on the PQC migration landscape she references.
• NIST NCCoE — PQC Migration FAQ — Authoritative federal policy context, including algorithm finalization and binding federal deadlines.
• "Booz Allen Wins Air Force Quantum Research Contract" — ExecutiveBiz — The $25.3M AFRL contract for quantum R&D through 2031 that frames Booz Allen's current federal quantum posture.
• "Booz Allen Backs the Search for Quantum's Next Breakout Company" — The Quantum Insider — Booz Allen as presenting sponsor of the QWC 2026 Startup Pitch Competition, the event where this conversation was recorded.

Key Quotes & Insights

> "The problem wasn't actually an engineering problem. An engineering tool existed for the problem they were having us solve. The problem was that getting certified to use that tool took so long that most nurses didn't have the time to get trained on it."

— Isabella on the capstone project that shaped her entire career philosophy: adoption is often a harder problem than invention.

> "First you have to solve for physics, then you have to solve for engineering, and then you have to solve for business case. But I would argue then you have to solve for operationalizing something — which is even beyond them."

— On the four-stage arc that the quantum field's commercialization narrative tends to stop one step too early.

Insight: When Booz Allen sat a computational biologist and chemist down with their quantum algorithm team to walk through an actual drug discovery workflow, the team discovered that the step they'd assumed was the computational bottleneck wasn't the bottleneck at all. The right use case only became visible when the domain experts were in the room.

> "I need to do this purposefully. I have to purposefully open reqs where we are looking for people with more than just a physics degree."

— On why interdisciplinary hiring is a deliberate strategy, not a nice-to-have.

Insight: Isabella draws a direct parallel between the rise ...

Dr. Shintaro Sato is a Fellow and Head of the Quantum Laboratory at Fujitsu Research, and Deputy Director of the RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Centre. He oversees Fujitsu's entire quantum effort — from device fabrication through error correction architecture, software, and application research — and has been building toward commercial quantum systems since Fujitsu began its serious quantum R&D push around 2020. With over 164 publications spanning graphene nanoelectronics, superconducting qubit design, and fault-tolerant architectures, he brings both deep technical credibility and a rare full-stack perspective.

This conversation is timely because two significant developments converged almost simultaneously just before recording: Fujitsu announced a tin-vacancy (SnV) diamond-spin prototype developed with TU Delft and QuTech, and began testing its STAR error-correction architecture on neutral-atom hardware with startup Yaqumo — an explicit signal that Fujitsu is betting on hardware-agnostic software layers even as it races to scale its own superconducting devices. Listeners who follow quantum hardware roadmaps, fault-tolerant computing, or Japan's national quantum strategy will find this episode unusually specific and candid.

What We Get Into

• How Fujitsu actually fabricates its superconducting chips — Sato explains how the team adapted Nakamura-sensei's original RIKEN designs, developed their own Josephson junction uniformity techniques, and built a research fab capability from scratch rather than licensing finished devices.
• Why packaging is the hardest problem at 1,000+ qubits — not the qubits themselves, but the superconducting wiring, chip-to-chip interconnects, interposers, and the sheer number of control lines running from room temperature to millikelvin. Sato is candid that his engineers "don't want to do it anymore."
• What STAR architecture actually does — it's not a new error-correction code; it operates at the logical gate layer above the surface code, replacing the notoriously expensive T gate with phase-rotation gates and selectively reintroducing T gates only when rotation angles would otherwise accumulate too much error. Version 3 achieves roughly a 10x accuracy improvement over version 2 for the same physical qubit count.
• Why STAR is hardware-agnostic — because it operates at the logical operation layer rather than the physical error-correction layer, it can in principle run on any hardware modality. Fujitsu has now begun testing it on Yaqumo's neutral-atom platform, and Sato mentions QuEra has also demonstrated STAR independently.
• What tin-vacancy (SnV) diamond-spin qubits are actually for — not a replacement for superconducting qubits, but a photonic interconnect technology. SnV centers emit photons that can carry quantum information between modules, potentially linking separate dilution refrigerators — a transduction approach that sidesteps one of the hardest problems in scaling superconducting systems.
• The speed mismatch problem in hybrid architectures — superconducting qubits operate at gigahertz speeds; nuclear spins in diamond-spin systems operate at kilohertz. Sato acknowledges this directly and frames it as an architectural challenge analogous to CPU-memory hierarchies in classical computing.
• What Fujitsu's open-source strategy looks like in practice — the collaboration with Osaka University on Project Octopus, which produced an open-source full-stack control and software platform, is now being adopted as part of Fujitsu's commercial offering.
• What 2030 actually looks like — Sato is measured: a 10,000-qubit machine will still be a "very small scale logical quantum computer," most useful for quantum chemistry in hybrid HPC+quantum workflows. Revolutionary applications will come incrementally, not all at once.
• The long-term vision — Sato's stated dream is a quantum computer small enough to fit in a smartphone, which he acknowledges requires entirely different physics than anything on today's roadmap.

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Dr. Shintaro Sato — Fujitsu Quantum Day Profile — Fujitsu's own bio page covering Sato's dual role at Fujitsu Research and RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Centre.
• Shintaro Sato — ResearchGate Profile — Full publication list (164 papers, 3,096 citations); useful for tracing his path from graphene nanoelectronics to quantum architecture.
• Interview with Shintaro Sato — QuTech — Sato discusses the NV-center and diamond-spin collaboration with QuTech and the vision for quantum-as-a-service.

Hardware Roadmap & STAR Architecture

• Fujitsu Quantum Day 2026 — Sato Presentation Slides (PDF) — Primary-source slides showing the full hardware roadmap: 64 → 256 → 1,024 → 10,000+ qubits with STAR architecture milestones.
• Fujitsu Officially Starts 10,000+ Qubit Development — Fujitsu Press Release (Aug 2025) — Official announcement of the early-FTQC 10,000-qubit program targeting FY2030.
• STAR Architecture Overview — Fujitsu Global — Technical explainer for STAR ver. 3 (announced March 2026), including the qubit-reduction claims for ruthenium-catalyst calculations.
• How Fujitsu Is Tackling a 10,000-Qubit Quantum Computer — The Quantum Insider (Dec 2025) — Deep-dive on STAR architecture and the 250-logical-qubit target.

Diamond-Spin & SnV Prototype

• Fujitsu Develops Diamond-Spin Quantum Computer Prototype — The Quantum Insider (Sept 2026) — Announcement of the SnV-center diamond-spin QPU prototype from the Fujitsu/TU Delft/QuTech collaboration.
• Fujitsu Diamond-Spin SnV Prototype Analysis — Quantum Computing Report (Sept 2026) — Technical breakdown of SnV center advantages, photon emission characteristics, and hybrid roadmap context.
• Fujitsu and QuTech Realize High-Precision Quantum Gates — Fujitsu Press Release (Mar 2025) — NV-center two-qubit gate fidelity result (<0.1% error) published in Physical Review Applied; the technical foundation for the SnV work discussed in this episode.

Neutral-Atom / Yaqumo Collaboration

• Fujitsu and Yaqumo Begin Testing on Neutral-Atom Hardware — The Quantum Insider (Sept 2026) — Breaking news on STAR validation on Yaqumo's neutral-atom processors, announced just before this recording.
• https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/fujitsu-and-yaqumo-test-quantum-a...

Marie Lepske brings a combination that's genuinely rare in venture: a background in applied mathematics and physics, early experience covering quantum at Runa Capital before most generalist funds knew the field existed, and now a GP seat at Constructor Capital, which closed a $110M Fund I in February 2026 with more than half its capital directed toward next-generation computing including quantum. She backed Qnami at Runa — a quantum sensing company acquired by Quantum Design in June 2026, one of the few clean sensing exits the field has produced — and Constructor's portfolio includes QuEra, which raised over $230M in a round led by Google Quantum AI and SoftBank.

The conversation matters now because the quantum investment landscape is genuinely changing. SPAC activity, mega-rounds from hyperscalers, and rising valuations are pulling in non-specialist capital at the same time that the science is getting harder to evaluate from the outside. Lepske is one of the people who has to navigate that tension every day, and she's willing to name the failure modes.

Founders building quantum or deep-tech companies, investors trying to understand where specialist and generalist capital intersect, and technically curious listeners who want to understand how the business side of quantum actually works will all find this episode useful.

What We Get Into

• Why technical training matters at the earliest stages — and what it actually buys you when a founding team's only asset is a laboratory and an optical table, before there's even a legal entity
• How the specialist-versus-generalist divide is evolving — Lepske's 2022 argument that early-stage quantum would stay specialist territory, and how she reads the arrival of Google, SoftBank, and NVIDIA in QuEra's cap table
• The due diligence framework for pre-product science startups — team provenance, patent landscape, IP legal review, and how Constructor uses its scientific advisory board to validate founders they can't fully assess internally
• What a "no" looks like — the specific signals that make Constructor wait rather than invest, including teams with strong science but no credible path to market and IP positions that are already crowded
• The Qnami exit and what it reveals about quantum sensing — why sensing applications are currently concentrated in R&D markets, which verticals Lepske thinks will break out first, and why sensing competes with computing for buyer attention
• The SPAC problem — why the wave of quantum public listings concerns her, and why evaluating roadmap credibility requires the kind of deep familiarity that takes years to build
• How Constructor supports portfolio companies beyond capital — executive hiring, software development guidance, co-investor introductions, and the limits of that hands-on model
• AI and quantum as parallel tracks — why she doesn't see AI as cannibalizing quantum talent or capital, and where she thinks the two fields will eventually converge

Resources & Links

Guest & Fund

• Marie Lepske — LinkedIn — Primary professional profile; includes keynote highlights and 2026 speaking engagements
• Constructor Capital — Official Website — Fund homepage with portfolio listings, team bios, and investment thesis across DeepTech, Software Tech, and Knowledge Tech
• Constructor Capital Fund I Close (Tech.eu, Feb 2026) — Coverage of the $110M close, check sizes ($1–10M, select up to $15M), and the university sourcing network

Portfolio Companies Referenced

• QuEra — $230M+ Financing Round Announcement — The round led by Google Quantum AI and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with NVIDIA's NVentures participating
• Qnami Acquisition by Quantum Design (The Quantum Insider, June 2026) — The sensing exit discussed in the episode; context on what a quantum sensing acquisition looks like

Background Reading

• Quantum Computing Report — "Venture Capital Trends in Quantum Technologies" (Runa Capital, 2022) — Lepske's co-authored market analysis, the source of her "specialist VC" thesis discussed in the episode
• Constructor Capital — "Quantum Investing Playbook" (Nov 2025) — Her Paris keynote on making successful quantum investments; source of the valuation figures cited in the conversation
• Entangled Future — Quantum Computing Funding & Investment Landscape 2026 — Context on the $4.9B private VC figure for 2025 and the broader public commitment landscape

Recent Constructor News

• Constructor Start Demo Day Finalists (The Quantum Insider, Sept 2026) — Quantum startups among the 16 finalists announced one week before this recording

Key Quotes & Insights

On what early-stage diligence actually looks like: > "They have only laboratory, and they have optical table which they want to show to you and you should understand if they have some interesting and useful patents or they can file them during the next one to two years."

On where specialist and generalist capital divide: > "These bigger players, they're coming later. They're coming when we already investigated that this particular technology and this particular team actually could win."

On the SPAC problem: > "It's very difficult for [non-specialist investors] to evaluate if they're doing proper investment or not, or if this valuation is good or not… You should be able to find out these roadmaps and to understand if this is a real roadmap or just written for the SPAC."

Insight — sensing vs. computing for buyer attention: Lepske observes that quantum sensing is structurally underappreciated relative to computing, not because the products aren't real, but because governments and corporates perceive computing as the larger prize — which she suggests is not obviously correct.

Insight — quantum talent scarcity as a leading indicator: She notes that quantum computing companies are now competing for talent the way AI companies did four or five years ago, with roughly 400–450 relevant laboratories globally — a number that puts the field's scale in sharp relief.

Related Episodes

• Ep. 22 — Trapped Ions and Quantum VCs with Chiara Decaroli — Another physicist-turned-investor conversation; useful companion for understanding how scientific training shapes investment judgment in quantum hardware
• Ep. 96 — https://www.newquantumera.com/podcast/funding-the-quantum-middle-series-a-...

Tim Palmer is not a quantum computing skeptic from the outside. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a CBE, an IPCC lead author, and the inventor of probabilistic ensemble forecasting — techniques now used in every major weather prediction center on Earth. He did his PhD in general relativity under Roger Penrose. When someone with that profile publishes a peer-reviewed paper in PNAS arguing that the entire fault-tolerant quantum computing roadmap may rest on a mathematical assumption that is subtly and profoundly wrong, it is worth paying close attention.

The timing matters. The quantum computing industry is spending billions on the assumption that standard quantum mechanics scales indefinitely — that if you can build enough error-corrected qubits, Shor's algorithm will eventually factor RSA-2048. Palmer's RaQM framework, reviewed by leading quantum foundations researchers including Lucien Hardy and Nicolas Gisin, makes a concrete, falsifiable prediction that this assumption will fail somewhere between 200 and 1,000 error-corrected qubits. That falsification window is opening right now. This episode is for anyone who cares about the foundations of quantum mechanics, the long-term viability of fault-tolerant quantum computing, or the rare pleasure of watching a serious scientist put a real stake in the ground.

What We Get Into

• Why Palmer left general relativity and came back to quantum foundations decades later — the conceptual thread connecting chaos theory, climate forecasting, and the geometry of quantum state space
• What Rational Quantum Mechanics actually proposes — specifically, why Palmer argues that Hilbert space should be defined over rational numbers rather than the full continuum of complex numbers, and what that means physically
• The information-theoretic argument for a qubit ceiling — why, in RaQM, the information content of n entangled qubits grows linearly with n rather than exponentially, and why that creates a hard conflict with the quantum Fourier transform above a few hundred qubits
• Why the 2022 Nobel Prize did not prove non-locality — Palmer's careful distinction between "Bell's inequality is violated" (experimentally established) and "the world is non-local" (an interpretation), and why that distinction matters enormously
• How gravity enters the picture — Palmer's argument, drawing on Penrose-style thinking, that gravity is the physical mechanism responsible for discretizing Hilbert space, and how that determines the numerical qubit ceiling
• Why the ceiling is technology-dependent but bounded absolutely — how Palmer estimates ~400 qubits for current photonic technology and argues that no technology, however exotic, can push the limit above ~1,000
• What happens to Shor's algorithm specifically — why the quantum Fourier transform is the precise point of failure, and what that means for RSA encryption and the post-quantum cryptography transition
• The optimistic read on a potentially negative result — Palmer's argument that a fundamental discovery about quantum mechanics, even one that limits quantum computing, could open doors we cannot yet imagine, in the same way general relativity eventually gave us GPS

Resources & Links

Guest

• Tim Palmer — Oxford Department of Physics — Full publication list, including the RaQM paper and prior quantum foundations work
• Royal Society Fellow Profile: Professor Tim Palmer CBE FRS — Official Fellow profile covering Palmer's career from ensemble forecasting to quantum foundations
• Oxford Quantum Institute: Tim Palmer — Confirms Palmer's affiliation with OQI

Papers & Articles

• "Rational Quantum Mechanics: Testing Quantum Theory with Quantum Computers" — PNAS (March 2026) — The primary paper discussed in this episode; the full RaQM proposal with the qubit-ceiling prediction
• arXiv preprint: "Rational Quantum Mechanics: Testing Quantum Theory with Quantum Computers" (Feb 2026) — Full preprint version with acknowledgements and references
• arXiv preprint: "Solving the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics: Why Nature Abhors a Continuum" (Feb 2026) — Companion paper laying out the philosophical and mathematical case for RaQM; good starting point for the conceptual argument
• Oxford Physics News: "Rational Quantum Mechanics — A New Theory of Quantum Physics" (March 17, 2026) — Oxford's official press release; accessible summary of RaQM and its implications
• IAI TV: "New Theory Argues Quantum Physics Must Abandon Irrational Numbers and the Continuum" (May 2026) — Palmer's own popular-audience explanation of RaQM; a good read before or after the episode
• IAI TV: "Chaos Theory Eliminates Quantum Uncertainty" — Palmer's accessible argument that quantum uncertainty is epistemic rather than fundamental
• The Quantum Insider: "Is RSA Safe? New Study Argues Quantum Computers Face a Hard Ceiling" (March 2026) — Industry-facing coverage of RaQM's implications for cryptography
• PostQuantum.com: "The 1,000-Qubit Ceiling That Probably Isn't" (April 2026) — Skeptical technical rebuttal of RaQM's qubit-ceiling prediction; worth reading alongside the paper
• ECMWF Festschrift: "Tim's Adventures in Quantum Mechanics" (April 2026) — Palmer's own account of his transition from meteorology to quantum foundations; illuminating backstory
• arXiv: "Quantum Computers for Weather and Climate Prediction: The Good, the Bad and the Noisy" (Tennie & Palmer, 2022) — Palmer's earlier, more optimistic assessment of quantum computing for climate modeling; an interesting counterpoint to RaQM's ceiling prediction

Further Reading

• The Primacy of Doubt — Oxford University Press — Palmer's 2022 trade book synthesizing chaos, climate, and quantum uncertainty; accessible entry point to his broader thinking
• 214 is a delightful bonus to the conversation, a short story by Noel Gorelick that imagines what might happen if RaQM turns out to be true.

Key Quotes & Insights

> "It's not that nature ...

Daniel Loss is RDIA Chair Professor of Quantum Computing and Director of the Quantum Center at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia, where this work was done. He is also one of the most influential theorists in quantum computing. The 1997 Loss-DiVincenzo proposal — that electron spins in quantum dots could serve as qubits — now has more than 9,000 citations and is the conceptual foundation for the semiconductor spin-qubit platforms that Intel, HRL, Diraq, and a wave of European startups are actively building toward. In 2025, Loss was named a Clarivate Citation Laureate in Physics, a designation with a strong historical track record as a Nobel Prize predictor.

The reason to listen now is that Loss has turned his attention to a question that predates quantum computing itself: can reversible, energy-efficient classical logic be physically realized? His 2026 paper argues that the spin-qubit hardware the field has spent decades developing is, almost incidentally, the ideal platform to do exactly that — and that the energy advantage over room-temperature CMOS could be so large it would matter enormously for AI inference workloads and data-center power budgets. This episode is for anyone following the spin-qubit roadmap, the energy crisis in classical computing, or the deeper question of what semiconductor quantum hardware is ultimately good for.

What We Get Into

• Why reversible computing is having a moment now: The ideas of Landauer, Bennett, Fredkin, and Toffoli have been around since the early 1980s — Loss explains what changed experimentally that makes the proposal feel like engineering rather than philosophy.
• The core energy claim, unpacked: Loss walks through why a spin-qubit Toffoli gate operating near 4 Kelvin could cost roughly 10⁵ times less energy than its CMOS equivalent, even after accounting for refrigeration overhead — and where the accounting is still incomplete.
• What makes the computation classical and the hardware quantum: The gate uses coherent quantum dynamics internally, but inputs and outputs are classical spin states. No superposition is required between gate operations, which dramatically relaxes the error-correction burden.
• The iToffoli gate and why it works for classical logic: Loss describes how a target spin hopping between quantum dots, controlled by two neighboring spins, implements a universal reversible gate using only DC voltage pulses — no radio-frequency drives required.
• The Quantum Zeno trick for classical memory: Frequent projective measurement of a spin state can stabilize it against relaxation, turning one of quantum computing's central headaches into a feature for classical storage.
• Why AI inference is the natural first application: Error tolerance, parallelizability, and the absence of a need for new algorithms make AI inference workloads a compelling early target — and Loss argues this de-risks the spin-qubit enterprise regardless of whether fault-tolerant quantum computing arrives on schedule.
• The dual-use platform argument: The same germanium/silicon quantum-dot array could, in principle, run quantum algorithms when superposition is useful and classical reversible logic when it is not — a flexibility that changes the economic calculus for building the hardware.
• What the experimental community needs to do next: Loss describes the first falsifiable tests — a three-spin iToffoli truth table, energy budget measurements, and a five-dot reversible adder — and names the groups best positioned to run them.
• How the brain comparison reframes the stakes: Loss notes that his energy estimates put spin-qubit classical computing roughly four orders of magnitude below the energy cost of a biological synapse, which has implications for how we think about the physical limits of AI.

Resources & Links

Guest & Lab

• Daniel Loss' profile at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
• Daniel Loss — University of Basel, Condensed Matter Theory & Quantum Computing Group — Loss's lab page; lists current research areas, group members, and leadership roles including NCCR SPIN.
• Daniel Loss — Wikipedia — Comprehensive biographical overview, career history, and awards list for listeners who want background before or after listening.

Papers & Articles

• Classical Reversible Computation by Quantum Coherence — arXiv:2607.06219v3 (2026) — The central paper discussed in this episode; v3 adds a reversible-adder blueprint, control-electronics energy analysis, and optimized pulse sequences.
• Loss-DiVincenzo: Quantum Computation with Quantum Dots — Physical Review A (1998) — The foundational 1997/1998 proposal that started the spin-qubit field; cited more than 9,000 times and the direct ancestor of the hardware Loss now proposes for classical reversible computing.
• Long-Range Crossed Andreev Reflection in a Topological Insulator Nanowire — Nature Physics (2025) — A 2025 result from the Loss group with implications for topological quantum computing, showing the breadth of the research program surrounding this episode's topic.
• Prof. Daniel Loss Named Citation Laureate 2025 in Physics — NCCR SPIN — Announcement of Loss's Clarivate recognition; useful context for why this conversation is happening now.

Organizations

• NCCR SPIN — National Center of Competence in Research: Spin Qubits in Silicon — Switzerland's national spin-qubit research center, co-directed by Loss; the institutional home of much of the experimental work Loss references.
• Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics — Loss's new external scientific membership, signaling a push to connect topological quantum magnetism theory with experiment.

Key Quotes & Insights

> "If the physical platform is successful, we are guaranteed to have killer applications — because I don't need to find new algorithms for this." > — Loss on why classical reversible computing de-risks the spin-qubit investment, regardless of the timeline for fault-tolerant quantum algorithms.

> "The energy difference is a factor of ten to the fifth. And this is mind-blowing." > — Loss summarizing the device-level energy advantage of a spin-qubit Toffoli gate over its CMOS equivalent, after accounting for refrigeration overhead.

Insight: Loss argues that the Quantum Zeno effect — the tendency of frequent measurement to freeze a quantum state — can be used deliberately to stabilize classical spin states against relaxation, turning a well-known quantum-computing obstacle into a memory-stabilization tool for classical logic.

Insight: The proposal requires superposition only inside a gate operation, not between operations. This means the error-correction burden is classical (majority voting) rather than quantum (surface codes or similar), which is a qualit...

Román Orús is one of the rare physicists who built a foundational mathematical tool — tensor networks — and then watched it become the engine of a unicorn. His 2013 introduction to tensor networks has been cited over 2,000 times; his company, Multiverse Computing, just announced a $570 million Series C at a $1.7 billion pre-money valuation. That arc — from condensed matter theory to Europe's largest quantum software company — is worth understanding on its own terms. But what makes this conversation particularly timely is a May 2026 paper Orús co-authored demonstrating that individual layers of Meta's Llama 3.1 8B language model can be encoded as quantum circuits and executed on IBM's 156-qubit Quantum System Two while the model generates text. It's a proof of concept, not a product — but it's a real result, and Orús is honest about what it does and doesn't prove.

This episode is for listeners who want a technically grounded, hype-free account of the quantum-AI intersection: what tensor networks actually are, why they keep getting rediscovered across different fields, where classical simulation of quantum systems genuinely competes with quantum hardware, and what it looks like to build a company at the boundary between those two worlds.

Sponsor Message

The Capital of Quantum is a people story. Built on a top-five quantum PhD program and 35-plus years of quantum research leadership. It's the billion-dollar initiative behind Discovery Center, launching this month with Microsoft, IQM, and Quantum Motion inside. That's why IonQ was born and is headquartered here, and why global companies keep choosing a spot minutes from Washington, D.C. This is where quantum is transforming the world. Come see it at the Quantum World Congress, September 23rd through 25th, College Park, Maryland. https://capitalofquantum.com.

What We Get Into

• What tensor networks actually are — Orús explains the core idea without equations: tensors as the "DNA" of a quantum state, and how a network of them lets you see and quantify the internal correlations (entanglement) that matter versus the ones you can safely ignore.
• Why the same math keeps appearing in different fields — from condensed matter simulation to quantum computing simulation to machine learning, and why Orús sees that recurrence as a sign of something deep rather than a coincidence.
• How ChatGPT changed Multiverse's trajectory — the company was already applying tensor networks to machine learning before 2022; the emergence of large language models gave them a problem where the fit was obvious and the market was enormous.
• What "90–95% compression with minimal accuracy loss" actually means — Orús explains the overparameterization problem in current AI models and why he believes tensor networks address a genuine structural inefficiency, not just a tuning opportunity.
• The IBM kicked Ising model episode — Orús describes how his team rapidly produced a classical tensor network simulation of an experiment IBM had presented as evidence of quantum utility, and what that kind of competition between classical and quantum methods actually does for the field.
• The Cayley Unitary Adapter experiment — how Multiverse sliced individual layers out of Llama 3.1 8B, encoded them as quantum circuits, ran them on a 156-qubit IBM processor, and achieved a 1.4% perplexity improvement — and why Orús argues the improvement-per-parameter ratio is the number that matters, not the headline percentage.
• Why edge deployment is the real commercial driver — drones, satellites, vehicles, and industrial devices that cannot rely on cloud connectivity are the market pulling Multiverse toward smaller, more efficient models, not just benchmark competition with frontier labs.
• How Orús thinks about Multiverse's identity — he calls it a "quantum AI company," not a quantum company or an AI company, and explains what that distinction means for how they allocate research effort and where they expect to be when fault-tolerant quantum hardware matures.
• What he'd tell a PhD student today — a genuinely honest answer about the trade-offs between academic research and deep-tech industry, from someone who has lived both simultaneously.

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

• Román Orús — Personal Site — Lists talks, reviews, affiliations, and awards including the 2024 Physics, Innovation and Technology Prize from the Royal Spanish Society of Physics.
• Multiverse Computing — Official Website — Home page for CompactifAI, Singularity, and Multiverse's full product portfolio.

Papers & Articles Discussed in This Episode

• arXiv 2605.05914 — "Quantum-enhanced Large Language Models on Quantum Hardware via Cayley Unitary Adapters" (May 2026) — The paper at the center of the episode: Llama 3.1 8B layers running on IBM's 156-qubit Quantum System Two. Start here if you want the technical details behind the quantum-in-an-LLM result.
• Multiverse Computing — "Talking to a Quantum Computer" (May 2026) — The accessible blog-post version of the Cayley Unitary Adapter experiment; a good entry point before tackling the arXiv paper.
• arXiv 2401.14109 — CompactifAI: Extreme Compression of Large Language Models Using Quantum-Inspired Tensor Networks — The foundational peer-reviewed paper introducing Multiverse's tensor network compression method.
• arXiv 2509.06653 — "Classical Neural Networks on Quantum Devices via Tensor Network Disentanglers" (Sep 2025, rev. Apr 2026) — Orús, Singh, and Aizpurua on hybrid classical-quantum execution for bottleneck neural network layers; the research underpinning the longer-term hybrid architecture vision.

Models & Products

• HyperNova 60B on Hugging Face — Open-source 50%-compressed model derived from GPT-OSS-120B; context for Multiverse's open model strategy.
• Pulsar 16B Launch with NVIDIA (June 2026) — Announcement of Multiverse's open reasoning model, scoring 87.22 on AIME 2025 at 16B parameters.

Funding & Company Context

• Series C Announcement — GlobeNewswire (July 2026) — $570M / €500M round at $1.7B pre-money valuation; covers investor lineup and deployment verticals.

Key Quotes & Insights

> "We are using atomic bombs to kill a mosquito." Orús on the overparameterization of current large language models — and why he believes the transformer-attention paradigm, however successful, ...

Piotr Lewandowski is a software engineer based in Poland who, as a side project, has built something that no well-funded research institute has: a continuously updated, ontology-tagged intelligence platform that ingests the entire quant-ph archive, tracks thousands of open quantum roles across hundreds of companies, parses patents and grants and open-source repositories, and links all of it to individual researcher profiles. He is not a tenured academic or a hardware engineer. He is an independent data practitioner, and that outsider position gives him a vantage point on the quantum workforce that insiders rarely have — or rarely share.

This conversation matters now because the quantum industry is simultaneously claiming a generational workforce opportunity and struggling to fill highly specialized roles. Lewandowski's data offers a rare ground-truth check on both claims. If you work in quantum hiring, research, policy, or investment — or if you're a student trying to understand what the field actually looks like from the outside — this episode will give you a more honest picture than almost anything else currently available.

What We Get Into

• How qubitsok's 500-tag ontology was built from scratch — why Lewandowski chose a tree-structured, parent-child tag system rather than relying on existing academic metadata infrastructure, and how it steers AI toward the most specific and useful classification rather than broad category labels.
• What the full quant-ph corpus reveals about researcher mobility — which countries are gaining quantum talent (Germany and China are notable winners) and which are losing it (the US and Australia are among the top brain-drain sources), based on tracking affiliation changes over time in published papers.
• The rising share of industry authorship in quantum research — industry-affiliated authors have grown from roughly 3.4% of quant-ph papers in 2005 to nearly 14% in 2026, and what that structural shift might mean for what gets published — and what doesn't.
• Why the platform tracks open-source contributions alongside papers — when researchers join industry and their publication rate drops, their open-source activity becomes a meaningful proxy for continued technical engagement, and qubitsok indexes both.
• The "qubie" talent-matching tool Lewandowski is building — rather than keyword overlap, qubie dispatches sub-agents to extract specific, claim-level evidence from a researcher's papers, dissertations, and other public writing, then returns a structured profile and interview guide for each candidate.
• Why sourcing quantum talent is a fundamentally different problem than general tech recruiting — the evidence of what a quantum researcher can actually do is largely public and published, but no one has had the infrastructure to read it systematically at scale until now.
• The two product directions Lewandowski is weighing — analytics and competitive intelligence for investors and companies versus talent matching for quantum hiring — and why he's currently prioritizing the latter.
• What it means to build a field-level intelligence platform as an outsider — Lewandowski is neither employed by a quantum company nor affiliated with a university, and that independence shapes both what he can see and what he can say.

Resources & Links

Guest Links

• https://qubitsok.com/ — The platform itself: quantum job board, daily arXiv paper digest with semantic tagging, and researcher collaboration search. All free for researchers and job seekers.
• https://qubitsok.com/collaborate — Search for quantum researchers by expertise, ontology tag, and affiliation — useful for finding collaborators or co-authors.
• Piotr Lewandowski on LinkedIn — The best place to reach him directly, especially if you're a company interested in early access to the qubie talent-matching product.
• Piotr Lewandowski on YouTube — His channel covering quantum computing job market analysis and platform updates.

Papers & Reports

• EPJ Quantum Technology — "The quantum technology job market: data-driven analysis of 3,641 job posts" (March 2026) — Lewandowski's peer-reviewed paper on the quantum job market, the most rigorous published treatment of the data underlying qubitsok.
• 2026 Quantum Computing Salary Report — Analysis of 194 salary data points drawn from real job postings; a useful benchmark for researchers and hiring managers alike.
• Fastest-Growing Quantum Skills 2026 — Lewandowski's analysis of 1,212 quantum jobs and 14,975 papers identifying which technical skills are accelerating and which are declining in the labor market.

Tools & Platforms

• https://qubitsok.com/jobs — Live quantum job listings, filtered by the platform's 500-tag ontology.
• https://qubitsok.com/region/europe — Live European quantum jobs market data, useful context for the EU talent and salary discussion.
• https://qubitsok.com/hire — Information for companies looking to use qubitsok's candidate database and, soon, the qubie matching tool.

Recognition

• Dr. Bob Sutor's "Quantum Follow Friday" (February 27, 2026) — Sutor Group newsletter highlighting Lewandowski as a key quantum community voice worth following; useful context for his growing recognition as an independent analyst.

Key Quotes & Insights

On why the published record is a better hiring signal than a LinkedIn profile: > "Research gives you this unique lens to see people's work before you talk to them. You can be really prepared, and this helps on two sides — you talk to people actually capable of filling the role, and you're not wasting their time asking questions they already answered via their published work."

On what brain-drain data actually shows: > "The biggest country that gained quantum computing talent in the last twenty-four months is Germany — which is not something someone could expect. And the biggest countries getting brain-drained are, interestingly, the United States."

Insight — on the soul-crushing reality of quantum sourcing: Lewandowski's first job in college was sourcing — going through profiles with pen and paper, making cold calls that nobody wanted to receive. His argument is that quantum hiring doesn't have to work that way, because the evidence of what a researcher can do is already public. The problem has never been a lack of signal; it's been a lack of infrastructure to read it.

On the rising share of industry authorship: Industry-affiliated authors have grown from roughly 3.4% of quant-ph papers in 2005 to nearly 14% in 2026 — a structural shift in who is producing the science, with implications for what gets published and what gets quietly redirected into proprietary pipelines.

Insight — on the limits of the data: Lewandowski is consistently careful about w...

Richard Entrup is unusual in quantum circles: he's not a physicist, and he doesn't pretend to be. He spent decades as a CIO, CTO, CDO, and CISO at organizations including Verizon, Christie's, Tiffany & Company, MoMA, Disney/ABC, and Time Warner before joining KPMG to lead its Emerging Solutions practice. That background — deep operational experience on the client side — shapes everything about how he thinks about quantum. He's not selling a hardware roadmap; he's thinking about what it actually takes to get a large, complex organization to change its cryptographic infrastructure before a threat materializes.

The conversation matters now because the signals are accelerating. NIST has finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards, executive orders in the US are pushing federal agencies toward PQC migration, and the algorithmic efficiency gains that reduce the qubit threshold for breaking RSA-2048 keep coming. Listeners who work in enterprise technology, cybersecurity, or quantum strategy — or who advise organizations that do — will find Entrup's practitioner perspective a useful counterweight to the more hardware-focused conversations that dominate the field.

What We Get Into

• Why Q-Day's exact date is the wrong question — and why the more important issue is how long it will take enterprises to even inventory their cryptographic exposure, let alone remediate it
• The scale of the cryptographic migration problem, including why a single laptop may contain hundreds of individual cryptographic components and why upstream/downstream API dependencies make this a supply-chain-wide challenge, not just an internal IT project
• Why "harvest now, decrypt later" creates urgency today, regardless of when fault-tolerant quantum computers arrive — and how compliance and regulatory timelines interact with that threat model
• What crypto agility actually means in practice — moving from a "set it and forget it" cryptographic posture to a dynamic, continuously monitored framework, including the pressure SSL certificate renewal windows are already creating
• How KPMG built its PQC practice, incubated it within the firm, and handed it off to the cybersecurity advisory team as a core service offering
• The "good quantum" side of the ledger — how KPMG's emerging research function is approaching quantum computing as a source of competitive advantage, not just risk, and what sectors are furthest along in exploring it
• The AI-quantum convergence, including Entrup's observation that AI is already being used to read and crack code — and what that means for the urgency of cryptographic modernization
• Why the enterprise quantum opportunity still has a long tail, and how the current moment compares to the early infrastructure phase of the internet — when everyone was talking about TCP/IP and DNS, not Uber or Netflix

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Richard Entrup — Worth Magazine Profile — Career arc from CIO/CISO roles at major global brands to KPMG's Emerging Solutions practice
• KPMG Quantum Dawn (2025) — KPMG's enterprise quantum readiness hub, introducing the Q-PREP framework and PQC implementation services, with Entrup as named lead
• KPMG Quantum homepage

Reports & Research

• KPMG — "The Quantum Threat Is No Longer Theoretical" (2026) — The threat brief discussed in this episode, charting the rapid decline in qubits needed to crack RSA-2048 and urging immediate PQC migration
• KPMG — "From Theory to Impact: Real-World Results in Quantum Machine Learning" (2026) — KPMG's joint report with IBM and Kipu Quantum on measurable quantum ML results on real hardware
• KPMG — "Prepare Now for Quantum Cyber Risk" — Board Leadership Article (2026) — C-suite and board-level guidance on integrating quantum risk into enterprise oversight
• arXiv — "Quantum-enhanced satellite image classification" (2026) — The underlying research paper behind the KPMG/IBM/Kipu Quantum ML results

Ecosystem & Events

• Chicago Quantum Exchange — KPMG Joins CQE (October 2024) — Announcement of KPMG's formal CQE membership, referenced in the episode as part of the firm's ecosystem-building strategy
• KPMG 2026 Quantum Consortium — The inaugural KPMG Quantum Consortium event (March 2026, Orlando) discussed in the episode

Independent Coverage

• Quantum Computing Report — KPMG joins Chicago Quantum Exchange (2024) — Independent coverage of KPMG's CQE partnership and enterprise quantum strategy
• Quantum Zeitgeist — Kipu Quantum satellite imagery coverage (Feb 2026) — Independent analysis of the KPMG/IBM/Kipu hybrid QML results

Key Quotes & Insights

> "It's not if but when. And it could be five years, could be three years, could be ten years. The fact is organizations are not gonna be ready. And that's the scary part." — Richard Entrup on Q-Day

> "This is not just the CISO. This is gonna be the software engineering app dev guys. This is gonna be all your partners, upstream and downstream, who have to also be compliant — because if you change your crypto and they don't, that stuff's gonna break." — On why PQC migration is an enterprise-wide, supply-chain-wide problem

Insight: Entrup draws a sharp distinction between the "bad quantum" (cryptographic risk requiring urgent defensive action) and the "good quantum" (competitive opportunity with a longer tail) — and argues that most organizations aren't adequately addressing either.

Insight: The analogy to the early internet is deliberate: just as the 1990s were consumed with TCP/IP and DNS rather than the applications those protocols would eventually enable, the current quantum moment is still largely an infrastructure conversation — and that's normal, not a sign of failure.

> "AI is expediting all of this. If AI is doing one thing, the use case is reading code and cracking it. That's pretty scary." — On the intersection of AI capability and cryptographic vulnerability

Related Episodes

• Ep. 81 — Quantum LDPC Error Correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster — Directly relevant: Cohen and Webster discuss how QLDPC error correction reduces the qubit overhead needed for RSA cryptanalysis, the technical underpinning of the threat timeline Entrup describes
• Ep. 38 — https://www.newqu...

Thaddeus Ladd has spent seventeen years at HRL as the theoretical anchor of its silicon spin qubit program — co-authoring the 2023 Nature paper that demonstrated universal logic with encoded spin qubits, and contributing to the 2026 QPU paper that integrated qubits, a cryo-CMOS controller, and a new superconducting ribbon cable into a single digitally controlled system. He is not a commentator on this acquisition; he is one of the people whose work made it happen.

The conversation is recorded eleven days after IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire HRL from Boeing and General Motors — a deal that has not yet closed. That timing makes this one of the few technically grounded, insider-adjacent conversations available about what IBM is actually buying, why the exchange-only spin qubit architecture is strategically distinctive, and what the combination of HRL's research culture with IBM's fabrication ambitions could produce. Listeners who follow quantum hardware, quantum computing strategy, or the evolution of industrial research labs will find this episode unusually substantive.

What We Get Into

• Why the 2026 QPU paper is a systems story, not just a fidelity story — the qubit chip, the cryo-CMOS controller operating at four Kelvin, and the new superconducting ribbon cable are all part of one integrated QPU, and that framing is central to understanding what IBM acquired.
• What "exchange-only" actually means — why using only voltage-controlled exchange interactions (no microwaves, no local oscillators, no phase tracking during idle) is both a technical constraint and a significant engineering advantage for scaling.
• Why the jump from six dots to fifty-four dots happened so fast — and what was happening in HRL's fabrication program that wasn't being published.
• What EUV lithography has to do with spin qubit scaling — and why the connection between HRL's process and IBM's Anderon 300 mm quantum foundry is one of the clearest pieces of strategic logic in the acquisition announcement.
• How HRL's cryo-CMOS work could benefit IBM's superconducting program — and why the control-and-interconnect bottleneck is a shared problem across modalities, not a spin-qubit-specific one.
• The "chandelier" reframe — Thaddeus's argument that the cables, filters, and control electronics surrounding a superconducting qubit chip are not overhead; they are part of the QPU, and understanding that changes how you read the HRL acquisition.
• Which modality Thaddeus thinks will reach commercially useful scale first — and why he still believes spin qubits are the long-term answer, using an analogy to vacuum tubes and silicon microprocessors that is worth hearing in full.
• What the acquisition means for HRL as an institution — the context of lost program funding, the December 2025 Q2B meeting, and what it means for a defense-oriented industrial research lab to find a commercial path through IBM.

Resources & Links

Guest

• Thaddeus D. Ladd — Personal Website & Publications — Self-curated, annotated bibliography; the best single source for his research arc across spin qubits and quantum communication.
• Thaddeus Ladd — Hertz Foundation Profile — Biographical overview of his career and role at HRL.
• Thaddeus D. Ladd — Google Scholar — Full citation record.

Papers & Articles

• A Digitally Controlled Silicon Quantum Processing Unit — arXiv (April 2026) — The QPU paper discussed at length in this episode: 54-dot device, cryo-CMOS controller at 4 K, superconducting ribbon cable, and error correction experiments — all working as one integrated system.
• Universal Logic with Encoded Spin Qubits in Silicon — Nature (2023) — The landmark result demonstrating universal logic with exchange-only encoded qubits; Ladd was co-author and lead theorist.
• Two-Dimensional Si Spin Qubit Arrays with Multilevel Interconnects — PRX Quantum (2025) — Scalable 2D spin-qubit arrays achieving greater than 99.9% single-qubit gate fidelity; the step between the 2023 and 2026 results.
• Silicon Encoded Spin Qubits Achieve Universality — HRL (2023) — HRL's public announcement of the Nature result; accessible summary for non-specialists.
• Semiconductor Spin Qubits: The Certainty of Progress — HRL (December 2025) — HRL's public framing of the platform's trajectory, published shortly before the Q2B meeting where Sebastian and Thaddeus first met.

Acquisition & IBM Strategy

• IBM to Acquire HRL Laboratories — IBM Newsroom (July 23, 2026) — The definitive transaction announcement; names the full scope of what IBM says it is acquiring.
• IBM to Acquire HRL Laboratories — HRL Laboratories (July 23, 2026) — HRL's concise confirmation of the deal and the beginning of regulatory review.
• What Are Spin Qubits? — IBM Quantum (July 23, 2026) — IBM's technical explanation of HRL's Si/SiGe exchange-only qubits and the shared silicon fabrication argument.
• A Brief History of HRL Laboratories — IBM Research (July 23, 2026) — IBM's institutional framing of HRL, including its history with the laser, self-aligned-gate MOS fabrication, and the 2026 spin-qubit QPU.
• IBM and U.S. Department of Commerce Announce Anderon Quantum Foundry (May 21, 2026) — The 300 mm quantum foundry announcement that Thaddeus identifies as one of the clearest pieces of strategic logic behind the HRL acquisition.
• IBM Commits More Than $10 Billion to Quantum Computing (June 2, 2026) — Capital context for the acquisition: R&D, manufacturing scale-up, M&A, and ecosystem investment over five years.

Tools & Platforms

• spinQICK — GitHub — HRL's open-source FPGA-based spin-qubit control toolkit; a concrete artifact of HRL's approach to open tooling.
• HRL Launches Open-Source spinQICK — HRL (July 2025) — Announcement and context for the spinQICK release.
• HRL Quantum — Collection of HRL quantum research, talks, and news.

Organizations

• <...

Aaron Kemp sits at an unusual intersection. He holds a doctorate in cybersecurity, spent years in DoD classified environments running SCI and SAP facilities, and now leads KPMG's quantum research practice — where he's a co-author on a recent hybrid QML paper with Kipu Quantum and IBM. He's also the lead author of KPMG's Q-PREP framework, which pushes enterprises to treat post-quantum cryptography migration as an operational risk problem right now.

If you've wondered how quantum actually lands inside a Fortune 200 boardroom — not the hype cycle version, but the "what do you actually tell the CFO" version — this episode maps that territory honestly. It's also useful listening if you're trying to understand the emerging talent gap, why the quiet in enterprise research publications may itself be a signal, and how a firm known for audit and advisory ends up doing multispectral analysis of chestnut trees on IBM quantum processors.

What We Get Into

• Why KPMG split quantum into distinct practices — PQC, sensing, optimization, and research — and what that structural choice signals about market timing
• How a PBS documentary about the American chestnut tree led to a peer-reviewed quantum ML paper with Kipu Quantum and IBM
• The honest case for a 3% accuracy gain over classical ResNet-50 baselines — and why Aaron treats it as a positive-sum signal rather than a victory lap
• Why "what makes a good quantum problem" remains the most important question in the field, and how KPMG's client base shapes their answer
• The seven-step Q-PREP framework for post-quantum cryptography readiness, and why step one — knowing what you actually have — is the hardest step
• How data-centric thinking (not cryptography-centric thinking) reframes the PQC migration challenge
• Why the quiet in enterprise research publications from major financial institutions may itself be a market signal
• The talent bottleneck: ~16,500 quantum researchers on the planet against a coming wave of enterprise demand
• How AI tooling is compressing quantum research timelines, and what that means for who can enter the field
• Why the compute stack of the next decade will be heterogeneous — quantum, neuromorphic, thermodynamic, and mechanical computing all coexisting

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Dr. Aaron Kemp — KPMG People Profile — Official bio covering Aaron's DoD/classified cybersecurity background and current role as US Quantum Leader.

Papers & Research

• arXiv:2602.18350 — Quantum-enhanced satellite image classification — The peer-reviewed KPMG/Kipu Quantum/IBM paper Aaron co-authored, demonstrating hybrid quantum-classical accuracy gains on IBM processors.
• From Theory to Impact: Real-World Results in Quantum Machine Learning — KPMG's editorial summary of the satellite imagery research, framed for enterprise readers.
• From Theory to Impact — Full Technical Report (PDF) — The detailed technical companion walking through the hybrid pipeline step by step.

PQC & Enterprise Frameworks

• Q-PREP: Seven Steps to Post-Quantum Cryptography Readiness (PDF) — KPMG's prescriptive PQC migration framework, with Aaron as lead author.
• The Quantum Threat Is No Longer Theoretical (PDF) — Aaron's board-level brief on Q-Day urgency.
• Prepare Now for Quantum Cyber Risk (KPMG Board Leadership Center) — Aaron's article for corporate directors, originally in NACD Directorship Online.

Related Coverage & Commentary

• Kipu Quantum: Quantum-Enhanced AI Deployable in Production — Announcement of the production framework that removes quantum hardware from the inference loop; Aaron quoted as enterprise champion.
• KPMG's Seven Steps Build Quantum Resilience for Businesses (Quantum Zeitgeist) — Third-party coverage of Q-PREP.
• A Framework Can Tell You What to Do. It Cannot Tell You What You Have. (Qtonic Substack) — A critical response arguing that advisory frameworks don't solve the underlying cryptographic inventory problem — useful counterpoint reading.

Key Quotes & Insights

• On the 3% accuracy gain: "It's a positive game… we did a 12–15 week sprint, and to at least meet classical was our goal when we started. So when we actually did get three percent, it was repeatable. That was, to me, okay — there's something there."
• On the real PQC problem: "We don't have a cryptographic problem. We have a data problem. None of these organizations know where their data flows."
• On cybersecurity as a discipline: "Cybersecurity is probably the worst career field ever because perfect cybersecurity has no ROI — because nothing happens."
• On enterprise timing: Insight: Aaron frames the quiet in financial services quantum research publications as a market signal — organizations may have stopped sharing because they're moving from research toward competitive advantage.
• On the talent gap: "There's 16,500 quantum researchers on the planet… Fortune 200 will hire 16,000." A single tier of enterprise demand could exhaust the global talent pool.

Related Episodes

• Episode 14: A Hybrid NISQ-Classical Solution Architecture with Harry Buhrman — Foundational thinking on hybrid quantum-classical architectures relevant to the Kipu/KPMG/IBM approach.
• Episode 38: Quantum Machine Learning with Jessica Pointing — A rigorous look at the tradeoffs and open questions in QML that frame Aaron's satellite imagery results.
• Episode 81: Quantum LDPC error correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster — Directly relevant to the compressing resource estimates for breaking RSA that shape PQC urgency.
• Episode 86: Quantum Advantage Achieved with Dominik Hangleiter — A theorist's careful framing of what advantage claims should and shouldn't mean.
• Episode 40: Integrating Quantum Computers and Classical Supercomputers with Martin Schultz — Useful context on the heterogeneous compute future Aaron and Sebastian discuss at the end of the episode.

Stay in the Ecosystem

• Subscribe on https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the...

Barak Bussel is one of the few people operating simultaneously at three levels of the quantum stack: deploying private capital into hardware and software companies through 7i Capital, chairing the strategic board of a major university quantum center, and helping stand up the physical infrastructure — a 700,000 square foot research park on the site of the former Westside Pavilion — meant to convene academia, industry, national labs, and startups in one place. He is also a physicist by training, which changes the kind of diligence questions he asks.

We recorded this at the KPMG Tech and Innovation Symposium in Deer Valley, only weeks after the most consequential stretch of quantum news in years: Oratomic's $300M Series A (the largest first institutional round in quantum history, with 7i in the syndicate), a Google Quantum AI paper cutting Shor's algorithm resource estimates to around 500,000 physical qubits on superconducting hardware, and two June 2026 White House executive orders on quantum innovation and post-quantum cryptography. If you want to understand how a serious investor is actually pricing risk, timelines, and ecosystem-building in this moment, this is the conversation.

What We Get Into

• Why 7i backed Oratomic's aggressive "no intermediate product, straight to fault tolerance" strategy, and how Barak thinks about betting on teams versus theses in deep tech
• How recent architecture and QLDPC error correction advances have compressed physical-to-logical qubit ratios, and what that means for near-term resource estimates for Shor's algorithm
• Why a lesser-noticed April 2026 Google Quantum AI paper on quantum-assisted memory reduction for classical AI workloads may matter as much as the Shor's-focused headlines
• What "patient capital" actually looks like when a connector problem eats two years of a portfolio company's roadmap
• The Bell Labs template as a serious operating model for the UCLA Research Park: convening academia, industry, government, and startups in a single physical footprint
• The historical resonance of UCLA sending the first ARPANET packet in 1969 and what that suggests about where quantum networking work should be anchored
• How Kedma's error mitigation work with IBM's Heron II and RIKEN pushed a 51-qubit Ising model simulation to the edge of what's classically tractable
• How Barak reads the June 2026 executive orders and the federal role — enabling infrastructure rather than picking winners — against the scale of Chinese government funding

Resources & Links

Guest & Organizations

• Barak Bussel bio — UCLA CQSE Strategic Board — Official page covering Barak's role as Board Chair and his physics and venture background.
• 7i Capital — Barak's deep tech venture firm, investing across quantum, AI, semiconductors, cybersecurity, robotics, clean energy, and space.
• UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering (CQSE) — The multidisciplinary center Barak chairs, spanning physics and engineering research.
• Barak Bussel on LinkedIn — Where Barak has publicly flagged the Oratomic investment and the June 2026 executive orders.

The Oratomic Round and Recent Breakthroughs

• Oratomic raises $300M Series A — The Quantum Insider — Confirms 7i Capital in the syndicate for the largest-ever first institutional round in quantum computing.
• Oratomic Series A deep dive — Quantum Computing Report — Technical breakdown of the reconfigurable neutral-atom architecture and full investor syndicate.
• Oratomic's "no intermediate product" strategy — MLQ.ai — Analysis of Oratomic's bet against the QuEra/Pasqal early-revenue playbook.
• QEDMA raises $26M Series A — Quantum Zeitgeist — 7i portfolio company Kedma's error mitigation round with IBM participation, referenced in Barak's Ising model results.

Policy and Market Context

• White House EO: "Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation" — One of the two June 22, 2026 executive orders Barak discusses.
• Sidley Austin analysis of the June 2026 quantum EOs — Legal explainer covering both the innovation EO and the post-quantum cryptography mandate.
• Cloudflare on the accelerated post-quantum timeline — Notes that Q-Day estimates have moved in response to Google and Oratomic breakthroughs.
• PitchBook Q2 2026 Quantum Computing Funding Report — Record 2025 VC totals and Q1 2026 liquidity data relevant to Barak's exit thesis.

UCLA Research Park and Regional Ecosystem

• UCLA launches SoCal Quantum Alliance — The regional coalition Barak references, with founding members including Caltech, JPL, Boeing, IBM, and Cisco.
• Quantum Innovation Hub at the UCLA Research Park — Preview of the 40,000 square foot lab space and the broader research park vision Barak describes.
• Quantum Innovation Hub Director appointment — Prof. Jason Petta named to lead the QIH, one of the founding anchors of the research park.

Key Quotes & Insights

• On patient capital in hardware: "You're producing a new chip… all of a sudden a year and a half has passed." Barak's example of a photonics company that spent two years solving a flex connector problem is a useful ground truth for anyone modeling quantum hardware timelines.
• On the role of universities: Industry has scale — the ability to throw 500 engineers at a problem. Academia brings "the quiet depth to think very deeply about a problem over an extended period of time, two or three generations ahead."
• On resource estimates: The gap between the original 20-million-qubit Shor's estimates and the recent Google Quantum AI paper suggesting ~500,000 physical qubits on superconducting hardware, plus Oratomic's neutral-atom approach at the ten-thousand-qubit scale, represents a genuine compression of the fault-tolerance horizon.
• On the underappreciated Google paper: An April 8 paper on using quantum processors to reduce memory requirements for massive classical data sets is, in Barak's view, the first rigorous demonstration that quantum could bend the exponential curve of AI compute demand.
• On government's role: "Typically in the U.S., government is not the best at picking the winners and losers in the marketplace. But it's great at enabling." The El Segund...

Kate Timmerman is the CEO of the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), and she is arguably one of the most consequential ecosystem builders in quantum today. Under her leadership, the CQE has grown from three founding institutions in 2017 to a coalition of more than 50 industry and academic partners, and the region has secured designation as a top global quantum ecosystem through The Bloch Quantum U.S. EDA Tech Hub and an NSF Regional Innovation Engine development award.

If you care about how emerging deep-tech industries actually get built — the unglamorous work of coordinating universities, startups, national labs, small manufacturers, workforce agencies, and federal policy — this episode is a masterclass. It's especially valuable for listeners trying to understand how quantum moves from bespoke, hand-built prototypes to real industrial-scale production, and what that transition means for jobs, national security, and U.S. competitiveness.

What We Get Into

• Why the CQE started 18 months before the National Quantum Initiative Act — and how that head start translated into winning multiple NQI research centers (SQMS, Q-NEXT, HQAN, and Q-NEXT-adjacent efforts)
• What the $55M Bloch Tech Hub award actually funds in the next 12 months, and why the money targets manufacturing rather than more research
• The severity of U.S. dependence on foreign and single-sourced quantum components — from nano-positioners to optics, photonics, and vacuum systems — and why that's slowing product delivery today
• How small and mid-sized Midwest manufacturers (in states that already rank top-10 in U.S. manufacturing) can pivot into the quantum supply chain without full re-tooling
• Why the BCG projection of ~$80B in regional economic impact and up to 191,000 quantum jobs by 2035 is more credible when you understand the full supply-chain vision, not just quantum computer vendors
• The five pillars of the CQE's NSF-backed "Advancing Together" workforce strategy — awareness, preparation, mobility, employer leadership, and coordination — and why employers themselves often can't forecast their own hiring needs
• What the Quantum Law Navigator™ is actually for, who uses it, and why first-time quantum founders often don't know what "export control" means until it's too late
• Why Q2B is relocating its North America conference from Silicon Valley to Chicago in December 2026 — and what that signals about where the center of gravity is moving

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Kate Waimey Timmerman — Chicago Quantum Exchange Profile
• Chicago Quantum Exchange — About — Overview of CQE's 2026 milestones, member institutions, and program portfolio

The Bloch Quantum Tech Hub ($55M EDA Award)

• UChicago News — CQE-led Bloch Quantum Tech Hub raises $55 million — Primary announcement of the July 2026 EDA award
• Quantum Computing Report — Bloch Quantum Tech Hub Secures $55M — Technical analysis of the award and its manufacturing focus
• The Quantum Insider — Bloch Raises $55M — Coverage including corporate commitments from IBM, IonQ, and Infleqtion
• The Quantum Insider — Bloch Advances in EDA Competition — Background on the tri-state coalition structure across Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana

Workforce & Economic Development

• HPCwire — CQE Releases Unified Strategy to Scale Midwest Quantum Workforce — Coverage of the NSF-backed "Advancing Together" report referenced in the conversation
• Argonne National Laboratory — Quantum Prairie Economic Symposium — Includes BCG's regional workforce and economic impact projections
• Illinois Economic Development Corporation — Kate Timmerman — Context on CQE's growth and Illinois' quantum strategy

Programs & Tools Mentioned

• UChicago PME — K1 joins CQE — Example of the Founders Platform bringing quantum-enabling startups into the ecosystem
• Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park (IQMP) — Context on the physical infrastructure supporting the Chicago quantum ecosystem
• Quantumzeitgeist — Bloch Drives $55M Quantum Prairie Expansion — Additional analysis on the domestic supply-chain focus

Key Quotes & Insights

• On the 18-month head start: "When we hear an anecdote once or twice, we realize, if we're hearing it once or twice today, that means in two years the U.S. government's gonna hear about it." Kate's argument for why nimble ecosystem organizations have to move before the market signal is obvious.
• On the supply chain problem: A significant portion of quantum components today are single-sourced and imported. That fragility, Kate argues, is quietly slowing every quantum company's ability to deliver products to customers — and it's the specific gap the Bloch award is designed to close.
• On the manufacturing pivot: The Midwest already has top-10 manufacturing states, but those small and mid-sized shops "tend to be more mom and pop type shops, and they don't have R&D budgets" to speculatively re-tool for quantum. Federal implementation funding is the mechanism to bridge that gap.
• On workforce reality: Employers "are so mission-focused on their tech development, they're not doing their own forecasts about what their jobs needs are gonna be in two and five years." Ecosystem organizations have to do that forecasting on behalf of the industry.
• On what universities quietly subsidize: "The universities end up doing a lot of stuff for free… a lot of the preparing for the future that is not maybe of incredible priority at the moment, but that fundamental work, yes, on the research side, but also on the workforce development side, is incredibly important."

Related Episodes

• Ep. 82 — The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson — The complementary conversation on IQMP, the physical infrastructure that Kate's ecosystem work plugs into.
• Ep. 75 — Regional quantum development with Alejandra Y. Castillo — Former EDA leadership on the policy logic behind Tech Hubs and inclusive regional innovation.
• https://www.newquantumera.com/podcast/building-a-quantum-ecosystem-from-scratch-wit...

Ben Castanon became Unitary Foundation's first CEO in February 2026, after roughly four years with the organization as Chief of Staff and then COO. He came into quantum from an unusual direction — leadership roles at Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn arts-and-science center — and that background shows in how he thinks about scaffolding communities, funding public goods, and borrowing what works from other fields.

This conversation matters now because Unitary Foundation sits at an inflection point. It has scaled from a microgrant program (the "Unitary Fund") into a foundation with a global developer community, corporate members including NVIDIA and IBM, an active compiler collection, a benchmarking initiative, and an annual open-source survey that increasingly serves as the field's ground truth. If you care about how quantum computing actually gets built — not just who wins the hardware race — this episode lays out the infrastructure argument clearly.

What You'll Learn

• Why Ben argues quantum open source falls into a structural funding gap between academia (chasing novel papers) and venture capital (chasing profitable businesses), and what philanthropy has to do about it
• What "public goods" and "digital commons" actually look like in quantum — from benchmarking to compilation to error mitigation tooling
• How to interpret the 2025 QOSS Survey finding that ~40% of full-time quantum OSS contributors are unpaid, and why Ben sees it as both an opportunity and a warning
• How Unitary Foundation is experimenting with continuous compensation for contributors via bounty programs and pilots with Merit Systems
• Why corporate members like NVIDIA and IBM invest in a vendor-neutral nonprofit — and how governance keeps the "open" in open source
• What a healthy pipeline from first-time contributor to sustained open-source maintainer would look like, and why Ben wants an endowment behind it
• Why Ben resists top-down definitions of the "open substrate" and prefers to let the community surface bottlenecks
• The long-term vision: a "Linux moment" for quantum, and what it would take to install it before proprietary stacks lock in

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

• Announcing Our New CEO — Unitary Foundation — The February 2026 announcement of Ben as UF's first CEO, with the full arc from Chief of Staff to COO to CEO.
• Ben Castanon on LinkedIn — Ben's professional history, including his Pioneer Works tenure and current UF work.
• Unitary Foundation — The organization's homepage and hub for grants, tools, membership, and community.

Papers & Reports

• 2025 Quantum Open Source Software Survey Results — The fourth annual QOSS survey, including the finding that ~40% of full-time contributors are unpaid.
• The Young and the Relentless — The Quantum Insider — Independent coverage of the QOSS survey's demographic findings.
• Celebrating Over 100 Microgrants — Impact report: 420+ citing papers, 3 startups, 1 nonprofit, and 400+ OSS contributors funded.

Tools & Programs

• Unitary Compiler Collection (UCC) — The frontend-agnostic quantum compiler collection Ben references as a candidate for the open substrate.
• UCC on GitHub — The active repo, supporting Qiskit, Cirq, PyTKET, and OpenQASM 2/3.
• unitaryHACK 2026 — The sixth annual bug-bounty hackathon, one of UF's core mechanisms for compensating open-source contributors.

Ecosystem

• NVIDIA Joins Unitary Foundation as Core Member — The May 2026 announcement referenced in the conversation.
• Announcing Unitary Foundation (Rebrand) — Context on why "Unitary Fund" became "Unitary Foundation."

Key Quotes & Insights

• On the structural gap: There are "third spaces" where projects don't fit the incentives of either a startup or an academic lab — but where the whole ecosystem benefits. Benchmarking is the clearest example.
• On unpaid contributors: "We've developed the field to a place where we're starting to hit up against the classic open source community issues." The volunteer surge is real — but so is the risk of losing those contributors to better-paying fields if UF can't convert enthusiasm into compensation.
• On why big companies join: A functional field needs people to hire. Ben's argument to corporate members is partly workforce development — thousands of developers getting on-the-job training on neutral, community-owned tools.
• On the substrate: Ben resists top-down definitions of what belongs in the open substrate. "It's much better to have all of the practitioners giving voice to what open tools they need."
• On his long-term ambition: Build a philanthropic endowment that funds the microgrant pipeline in perpetuity — because "I don't see that as ever becoming a resource that is not of use."

Related Episodes

• Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat — The direct companion to this episode, unpacking the white paper co-authored with Ben on why quantum OSS is structurally underfunded.
• Quantum Error Mitigation using Mitiq with Misty Wahl — A deeper look at Mitiq, one of UF's flagship open-source tools.
• Quantum Education and Community Building with Olivia Lanes — A parallel view on developer community and workforce development in quantum.
• Careers in Quantum with Anastasia Marchenkova — Relevant context on where quantum developers actually end up.

Stay in the Ecosystem

• Subscribe to The New Quantum Era on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Amazon Music.
• Sign up for the newsletter at https://www.newquantumera.com for episode notes, essays, and follow-ups.
• Follow along on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
• If you're building open-source quantum tools — or want to support the people who are — start at https://unitary.foundation.

...

Johannes Galatsanos occupies an unusual dual perch in the quantum ecosystem. As a co-author of the inaugural MIT Quantum Index Report, he's helped map the entire quantum landscape at altitude; as co-founder and CEO of Diffraqtion, he's staked his career on one of its most under-discussed corners: quantum imaging. The company spun out of Saikat Guha's lab at the University of Maryland after more than a decade of DARPA-funded research, emerged from stealth in January 2026 with $4.2M in pre-seed funding, and is now racing toward on-sky telescope demonstrations and a 2028 satellite launch.

This episode is for listeners who want a technically honest look at where the "quantum" label is doing real work in a sensor versus where it's shading into sophisticated photonics and analog computing. If you care about how quantum technologies actually reach the world — through markets, contracts, and hardware that ships — this conversation gives you a specific, concrete example to think with.

What You'll Learn

• Why a conventional camera can lose roughly 95% of the information a photon carries, and what quantum Fisher information theory says about recovering it
• How Diffraqtion's device processes light directly in the photonic domain before converting it to electronic information — and why that matters for shot noise
• The honest answer to "is this really quantum?" — including where the technology sits between quantum information theory, photonics, and analog computing
• Why a 6U CubeSat with a 10-centimeter aperture can plausibly compete with school-bus-sized observation satellites for specific tasks
• How a "diffractive neural network" runs image classification at the speed of light with negligible power consumption
• The difference between Diffraqtion's hard-coded Gen 1 camera and the reprogrammable Gen 2 that can swap algorithms in orbit (canopy detection over the Amazon, ship detection over the Atlantic)
• Why the Habitable Worlds Observatory needs a coronagraph capability — and how you can build one by processing light rather than blocking it
• What quantum sensing needs from policy, capital, and PR to escape the shadow of quantum computing

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

• Diffraqtion — Company homepage; describes the technology, NASA/DARPA lineage, and the "quantum eye" framing referenced in the conversation.
• Johannes Galatsanos on LinkedIn — Recent activity including SmallSat Europe, the NASA Space to Soil Challenge, and GQIG Summit talks on quantum imaging.

Papers & Reports

• Quantum Index Report 2025 (arXiv) — The preprint of the MIT QIR, co-authored by Galatsanos. Essential reading for anyone trying to see the quantum landscape as a whole.
• MIT Sloan — New MIT Report Captures State of Quantum Computing — Background on the QIR and Galatsanos's research role at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
• MIT Sloan — Quantum Report Charts Growing Business Interest — Further QIR findings on the growth in corporate quantum mentions.

Press & Coverage

• Diffraqtion Pre-Seed Announcement (PR Newswire) — Official release covering the $4.2M raise, DARPA contract, and founding team.
• Breaking Defense — DARPA Backs Diffraqtion — The most in-depth interview on the DARPA SBIR contract and programmable light plates.
• The Quantum Insider — Diffraqtion $4.2M Raise — Investor context including quotes from Chad Rigetti; technical claims on resolution and processing.
• Payload Space — Diffraqtion Emerges from Stealth — Commercial framing around the 6U CubeSat cost model.
• Defense One — Quantum Cameras Could Remake Space-Based Intelligence — Policy and defense framing.

Sponsor

• Cisco Universal Quantum Switch — Outshift by Cisco — Cisco's incubation engine, building a scalable quantum network on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture.

Key Quotes & Insights

• On quantum information loss: "When you do a direct image… you lose something like 95% of information from that photon. So you leave 95% on the table, and the question was: how do you extract that back?"
• On what "quantum" really means here: Galatsanos is refreshingly candid — the device uses quantum Fisher information theory to set the physical limit and configure the hardware, but the runtime processing is closer to analog photonic computing than to gate-based quantum computing. He describes it as sitting between "quantum 1.0" and quantum sensing.
• On the frog's-eye analogy: Retinal ganglion cells can process shapes and trajectories faster than the brain — which is why you can catch a baseball or a falling fork before you consciously see it. Diffraqtion is trying to give satellites and robots the same kind of reflex.
• On the JPEG as a historical artifact: "JPEG was a little bit of a logical step… but now the thought is, forget about it — you don't even need that. The light itself already will tell you." The machine, unlike a human operator, doesn't need an image.
• On why quantum sensing lags in the discourse: Insight — quantum computing benefits from a single unifying narrative that every vendor can pull on. Quantum sensing has to invent its own story from scratch for each modality, which is a structural PR disadvantage more than a technical one.

Related Episodes

• Ep. 65 — Quantum sensitivity breakthrough with Eli Levenson-Falk — On protocols that push measurements beyond conventional limits; a natural companion to the Fisher information discussion.
• Ep. 16 — Operating at the Quantum Limit with Dr. Dana Anderson — Infleqtion's CSO on quantum sensing alongside computing; useful context for why sensing is closer to deployment.
• Ep. 68 — Incubating quantum innovation with Vijoy Pandey of Outshift by Cisco — On quantum networks solving real problems today; a parallel to Diffraqtion's near-term deployment argument.
• Ep. 63 — A Programming Language for Quantum Simulations with Xiaodi Wu — Also from the University of...

This is the 100th episode of The New Quantum Era, and it arrives at a moment of convergence: the book is out, the Helgoland centennial documentary is in production, regional quantum ecosystems are scaling from ambition to construction, and the field is entering the transition from heroic-era qubit demos to the hard systems engineering that will determine whether quantum computing becomes a real industry. Bob Karr — who sits at the intersection of law, policy, and the quantum ecosystem as the person behind the Quantum Law Navigator and a convener across the Chicago quantum community — is the right person to conduct this retrospective, and Barnes & Thornburg, at the center of arguably the most sophisticated quantum ecosystem in the world, is the right place to do it.

The conversation is structured as a celebration and an examination: what has Sebastian actually learned by sitting with nearly 100 physicists, engineers, founders, and policymakers? How has the field changed since that first visit to TJ Watson in 2017? What do regional hubs like the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and Quebec's DistriQ tell us about what it takes to move from science to industry? And what does the next era demand — not just from researchers and companies, but from everyone?

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What You'll Learn

• Why the Helgoland documentary matters: in June 2025, Sebastian and his wife traveled to the island where Heisenberg's 1925 insight gave birth to quantum mechanics, producing a documentary at a Yale–Max Planck centennial conference attended by multiple Nobel laureates — and what that experience distilled about the state of the field
• How Sebastian's journey into quantum began: arriving at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in 2017 to help with Qiskit's open source strategy, encountering the 53-qubit milestone, and recognizing the earliest stages of an emerging technology that would become his life's work
• What the "Heroic Age of Qubits" was — and why it ended: the period of genius PIs racing to prove quantum advantage, culminating in Google's 2019 random circuit sampling claim, and why that finish line turned out to be a starting line
• What Harley Johnson and the IQMP reveal about ecosystem-building: why the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is the world's leading example of building a quantum ecosystem, and what it takes to bridge deep science and economic development
• What Quebec's DistriQ teaches about sustainability: the 90% public / 10% private funding model designed to flip over ten years, and why that benchmark matters for every regional hub
• Why Alejandra Castillo's economic development lens changed the picture: how quantum's impact extends far beyond qubits into advanced manufacturing, supply chain, and the communities that get to participate in the upside
• What Nadya Mason's leadership model means for the field: the dean of UChicago's Pritzker School who wasn't a "math person" and sees leadership as service — and why the field needs every kind of creative mind, not just PhDs in physics
• What John Martinis's arc from the 1986 Josephson junction paper through the Nobel Prize to CoLab reveals: the transition from heroic-era physicist to systems thinker pursuing open architecture and consortium-based quantum computing
• Why the Monte Carlo algorithm is the key analogy for quantum's future: the technique that took 30 years to find its commercial application as a reminder that the most important uses of quantum computers haven't been imagined yet
• Where fault tolerance actually stands: why it's an emergent property of the whole system — not a single breakthrough — and why the classical-quantum feedback loop for mid-circuit measurement and syndrome correction is the thing to watch
• Why multiple qubit modalities will coexist: the case for neutral atoms in the near term, superconducting and spin qubits in the long term, and photonics as a dark horse — and why this isn't a winner-take-all race
• What Build Quantum Partners is building: a new venture to reduce friction for quantum companies entering the U.S. market, partner with regional ecosystems, and ultimately develop the quantum equivalent of biotech hub infrastructure

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Resources & Links

Guest & Host Links

• Robert W. Karr Jr. — Barnes & Thornburg Attorney Profile — Bob's firm bio covering his role as partner and QTI Group co-chair
• Robert W. Karr Jr. — LinkedIn — Recent activities including the Illinois–UK Quantum Partnerships Mission and Keidanren Next-Gen Salon
• Quantum Law Navigator — Chicago Quantum Exchange (PDF) — The ten-chapter resource Bob led, mapping the U.S. legal and regulatory landscape for quantum
• Barnes & Thornburg Quantum Technology Industry Group — The firm's quantum practice, host of the live recording

The Book & Documentary

• The New Quantum Era by Sebastian Hassinger — Released May 2026; the companion book tracing the people, science, and engineering behind quantum technology's emergence
• Helgoland Documentary — In production; shot over five days at the Yale–Max Planck centennial conference on the island where Heisenberg formulated matrix mechanics in 1925

Episodes & Guests Referenced

• Episode 82 — The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson — The IQMP's CEO on building the world's largest dedicated quantum technology park
• Episode 79 — Building a Quantum Ecosystem from Scratch with Martin Laforest — How Quebec built a $400M quantum ecosystem with a deliberate public-to-private capital transition
• Episode 75 — Regional Quantum Development with Alejandra Y. Castillo — Quantum through the economic development lens: jobs, supply chains, housing, and community participation
• Episode 77 — Quantum Leadership with Nadya Mason — The dean of UChicago's Pritzker School on the human and institutional side of building the quantum era
• Episodes 48, 67, 71 — John Martinis — From Josephson junctions to the Google quantum supremacy experiment to the open-architecture approach at CoLab
• Episode 96 — Funding the Quantum Middle with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures — Why the Series A/B financing gap is the new bottleneck, and how specialist investors are stepping in

Key Institutions & Ecosystem

• Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park — Wikipedia — Overview of the $9B IQMP, its tenants,...

Daniel Faircloth, PhD is an unusual figure in the quantum ecosystem: a computational electromagnetics engineer who actually helped build trapped-ion hardware before pivoting to the software stack the field was missing. He's a co-author on the 2013 New Journal of Physics paper that demonstrated reliable ion transport through a microfabricated X-junction surface-electrode trap at Georgia Tech Research Institute, and he spent the years afterward inside a defense contractor, IERUS Technologies, building the electromagnetic simulation engine that has now spun out as Nullspace.

If you've been following the trapped-ion race — Quantinuum, IonQ, Oxford Ionics, AQT, and the academic groups feeding them — this episode fills in a layer of the story that rarely gets airtime. As the field moves from clever physics demonstrations toward genuinely scaled architectures, the design tools, the file formats, and the iteration loops start to matter as much as the qubits themselves. Listeners interested in quantum engineering, the analog of EDA in semiconductors, or how dual-use defense R&D translates into commercial quantum infrastructure will find a lot to chew on.

What We Get Into

• Why the standard "gapless approximation" for ion trap modeling — treating electrodes as polygons on an infinite metal sheet — breaks down well before you're ready to fabricate.
• How Faircloth's graduate-school question ("can better tools turn a good engineer into a super engineer?") became the design philosophy behind Nullspace ES.
• What turning an X-junction corner actually requires: two-stage optimization across trap geometry and control voltages, so the ion doesn't get heated out of the trap.
• Why general-purpose electrostatic solvers struggle with ion trap problems that demand nanometer ion-height precision and millivolt-level shuttling voltage accuracy.
• The technical leap in Nullspace ES 2025 R1: pairing high-order basis functions with a compression solver to cut memory usage roughly 5× while preserving accuracy.
• The awkward commercial reality of selling neutral simulation infrastructure to companies that are direct competitors with each other.
• The "build vs. buy" tension for hardware startups deciding whether to roll their own solver in Python or adopt a purpose-built commercial tool.
• How the dual-use defense / commercial-quantum positioning shapes Nullspace's roadmap — and where lessons flow in both directions.
• Where the roadmap might lead: multi-physics, tightly integrated workflows that eliminate the CAD-cleanup and file-format-exchange tax engineers pay today.

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

• Daniel Faircloth Bio — Nullspace, Inc. — Background on Daniel's path from GTRI and IERUS to co-founding Nullspace.
• Nullspace, Inc. — Company homepage covering the Nullspace EM and Nullspace ES product suites.
• Inside Nullspace: Rethinking Electromagnetic Simulation with Dr. Daniel Faircloth — A longer-form interview on why Daniel rebuilt EM simulation from scratch.

Product & Technical Resources

• Nullspace ES — Electrostatic Simulation for Quantum Computing — Product page detailing the ion-trap-specific capabilities discussed in the episode.
• Nullspace ES 2025 R1 Tech Brief — The release notes behind the high-order basis functions and 5× memory reduction Daniel describes.
• Precision Ion Trap Modeling and Simulation for Quantum Applications — Webinar featuring Oxford Ionics' Curtis Volin demonstrating Nullspace ES on a surface-electrode trap.

Papers & Background Reading

• Reliable Transport Through a Microfabricated X-Junction Surface-Electrode Ion Trap (NJP, 2013) — The GTRI paper Daniel co-authored, including the corner-turning ion transport work referenced in the episode.
• Daniel Faircloth — ResearchGate profile — Additional EM and ion trap publications from Daniel's GTRI/IERUS years.

Company & Funding Context

• Nullspace Raises $2.5M Seed Round (PR Newswire, Aug 2025) — The seed round led by Fathom Fund with Golden Seeds.
• Nullspace Raises $2.5M — The Quantum Insider — Quantum-sector framing of the dual-use RF/quantum positioning.
• Nullspace Inc. Launches as an Engineering Software Company (PR Newswire, Jun 2023) — The spin-out announcement and origin story.

Key Quotes & Insights

• On the original product question (paraphrase): If you give powerful EM and optimization tools to a well-trained engineer, can you effectively turn them into a "super engineer" and unlock the kind of creativity that textbook parameterizations can't reach? That question became the through-line from Daniel's graduate work to Nullspace.
• On why existing tools fall short (paraphrase): The community was trying to shoehorn ion trap design into solvers that were never built for it — gapless approximations, weak optimizers, and accuracy levels that simply don't hold up when you need nanometer ion heights and millivolt shuttling voltages.
• On corner-turning in an X-junction (Daniel, lightly edited): "If you think of an ion trap as a fancy train track system, the ions are being shuttled around — you need to be able to turn left and turn right as you grow and scale. How do you get the ion to turn but not get heated in that process and lose the ion?"
• On serving competing customers (paraphrase): A rising tide floats all boats. The better the underlying simulation tools, the more sophisticated the architectures every team can attempt — and the more chances the field has of someone breaking through.
• On the long-term vision (Daniel): "Being able to provide all of that in an appropriate fidelity, one-stop shop for the designers. I don't want them to have to go to a bunch of different tools and try to kind of piece together dealing with file format exchange issues."

Related Episodes

• Episode 91 — Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy — A complementary view of simulation infrastructure, focused on superconducting digital twins.
• Episode 17 — The Enchilada: Microfabricated Ion Trap Qubits with Daniel Stick — The Sandia pers...

EeroQ is unusual in two ways. It's the only company in the world commercializing electrons-on-helium qubits, a modality first proposed by Platzman and Dykman in Science in 1999. And it was founded by Nick Farina — a software entrepreneur, not a physicist — who got pulled into the field through a Chicago theater board where he met his future co-founder, then-PhD student Johannes Pollanen.

This conversation matters now because EeroQ has had an unusually productive twelve months: a Physical Review X paper demonstrating single-electron control above 1 Kelvin, a January 2026 result on controlling up to a million electrons with fewer than 50 control lines, and — published in Nature Physics on June 15, 2026 — the first demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, the cavity-QED readout-and-control link the platform depends on. If you're trying to understand which "second-tier" modalities deserve serious attention — and how a small, capital-light team in Chicago is thinking about scale-first hardware design — this is a useful listen.

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What We Get Into

• How a Chicago theater board led to one of the most unique qubit companies in the field
• Why electrons-on-helium failed in the early 2000s and why circuit QED, dry fridges, and CMOS now make it viable
• The physical picture: a thin superfluid helium film coating a CMOS chip, with electrons trapped a few nanometers above the surface by their own image charge
• Why EeroQ pivoted from motional states to spin qubits after Steve Lyon (Princeton) joined as CTO — and the predicted 10+ second coherence times that come with it
• The "build a quantum computer in reverse" philosophy: starting from a million-qubit architecture and working back toward two-qubit gates
• How the "Wonder Lake" chip controls 2,432 future qubit sites today, and why that's an engineering milestone rather than a qubit count
• Honest framing of where EeroQ actually is: no two-qubit gate demonstrated yet, with a tape-out target of ~10,000 qubits by late 2028
• Why dipole-dipole gates come first and exchange gates come later, borrowing from the spin qubit playbook
• The case that scaling — not qubit quality — has been the field's slowest-moving problem over the last decade

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

• EeroQ — Company site for the only commercial electron-on-helium quantum hardware effort.
• EeroQ Publications — Peer-reviewed papers and preprints from the team.
• Building a Quantum Computer in Reverse (EeroQ Blog, July 2023) — Farina's own articulation of the scale-first design philosophy discussed in the episode.

Key Papers

• Koolstra, Glen, Beysengulov et al., "Strong coupling of a microwave photon to an electron on helium," Nature Physics, June 2026 — First demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and the quantized motional state of a single electron on helium, including observation of vacuum Rabi splitting — establishing the cavity-QED readout link at the heart of EeroQ's architecture. This result was under embargo when the episode was recorded.
• Castoria et al., "Sensing and Control of Single Trapped Electrons Above 1 Kelvin," Physical Review X (2025) — The 1 K result Nick references; demonstrates charge sensing but not yet coherent spin manipulation.
• Koolstra et al., "High-impedance Resonators for Strong Coupling to an Electron on Helium," Physical Review Applied (Feb 2025) — The resonator architecture underlying EeroQ's cQED control approach.
• Electron-on-helium qubit (Wikipedia) — Useful overview including the original 1999 Platzman & Dykman Science proposal and Steve Lyon's 2006 spin-qubit paper in Physical Review A.

Press & Context

• EeroQ Makes World-First Breakthrough in Electron Qubits Floating on Helium (EeroQ, June 2026) — Company announcement of the Nature Physics strong-coupling result.
• EeroQ Solves the "Wire Problem" (PRNewswire, Jan 2026) — The million-electrons / fewer-than-50-wires result Nick cites.
• Individual electrons trapped and controlled above 1 K (Phys.org) — Independent coverage of the PRX paper.
• EeroQ Achieves Tape-Out of "Wonder Lake" Chip (The Quantum Insider, July 2023) — Background on the 2,432-site CMOS chip discussed in the episode.

Ecosystem

• Chicago Quantum Exchange — The regional consortium EeroQ benefits from.
• Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park — The state-backed quantum park anchored in Chicago.

Key Quotes & Insights

• On the contrarian thesis: "Scaling is actually the hardest part of building a quantum computer." Nick argues the field has made real strides on gate fidelity, error correction, and algorithms over the last decade — but not nearly enough on the path to hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits.
• On building in reverse: Rather than starting from a two-qubit gate and "hoping and praying to find ways to scale," EeroQ started by asking what a million-qubit processor would have to look like — which forced the choice of CMOS as the only manufacturing technology humanity has ever used to build features at that scale.
• On honest status: "We d...