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

Sebastian Hassinger
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Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, interviews brilliant research scientists, software developers, engineers and others actively exploring the possibilities of our new quantum era. We will cover topics in quantum computing, networking and sensing, focusing on hardware, algorithms and general theory. The show aims for accessibility - Sebastian is not a physicist - and we'll try to provide context for the terminology and glimpses at the fascinating history of this new field as it evolves in real time.

  1. 6 uur geleden

    Episode 100: Live at Barnes & Thornburg — Reflections on the First 100 Episodes

    This is the 100th episode of The New Quantum Era, and it arrives at a moment of convergence: the book is out, the Helgoland centennial documentary is in production, regional quantum ecosystems are scaling from ambition to construction, and the field is entering the transition from heroic-era qubit demos to the hard systems engineering that will determine whether quantum computing becomes a real industry. Bob Karr — who sits at the intersection of law, policy, and the quantum ecosystem as the person behind the Quantum Law Navigator and a convener across the Chicago quantum community — is the right person to conduct this retrospective, and Barnes & Thornburg, at the center of arguably the most sophisticated quantum ecosystem in the world, is the right place to do it. The conversation is structured as a celebration and an examination: what has Sebastian actually learned by sitting with nearly 100 physicists, engineers, founders, and policymakers? How has the field changed since that first visit to TJ Watson in 2017? What do regional hubs like the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and Quebec's DistriQ tell us about what it takes to move from science to industry? And what does the next era demand — not just from researchers and companies, but from everyone? --- What You'll Learn Why the Helgoland documentary matters: in June 2025, Sebastian and his wife traveled to the island where Heisenberg's 1925 insight gave birth to quantum mechanics, producing a documentary at a Yale–Max Planck centennial conference attended by multiple Nobel laureates — and what that experience distilled about the state of the fieldHow 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 workWhat 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 lineWhat 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 developmentWhat 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 hubWhy 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 upsideWhat 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 physicsWhat 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 computingWhy 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 yetWhere 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 watchWhy 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 raceWhat Build Quantum Partners is building: a new venture to reduce friction for quantum companies entering the U.S. market, partner with regional ecosystems, and ultimately develop the quantum equivalent of biotech hub infrastructure--- Resources & Links Guest & Host Links Robert W. Karr Jr. — Barnes & Thornburg Attorney Profile — Bob's firm bio covering his role as partner and QTI Group co-chairRobert W. Karr Jr. — LinkedIn — Recent activities including the Illinois–UK Quantum Partnerships Mission and Keidanren Next-Gen SalonQuantum Law Navigator — Chicago Quantum Exchange (PDF) — The ten-chapter resource Bob led, mapping the U.S. legal and regulatory landscape for quantumBarnes & Thornburg Quantum Technology Industry Group — The firm's quantum practice, host of the live recordingThe 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 emergenceHelgoland Documentary — In production; shot over five days at the Yale–Max Planck centennial conference on the island where Heisenberg formulated matrix mechanics in 1925Episodes & Guests Referenced Episode 82 — The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson — The IQMP's CEO on building the world's largest dedicated quantum technology parkEpisode 79 — Building a Quantum Ecosystem from Scratch with Martin Laforest — How Quebec built a $400M quantum ecosystem with a deliberate public-to-private capital transitionEpisode 75 — Regional Quantum Development with Alejandra Y. Castillo — Quantum through the economic development lens: jobs, supply chains, housing, and community participationEpisode 77 — Quantum Leadership with Nadya Mason — The dean of UChicago's Pritzker School on the human and institutional side of building the quantum eraEpisodes 48, 67, 71 — John Martinis — From Josephson junctions to the Google quantum supremacy experiment to the open-architecture approach at CoLabEpisode 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 inKey Institutions & Ecosystem Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park — Wikipedia — Overview of the $9B IQMP, its tenants,...

    1 u 20 m

  2. 29 jun

    Quantum EDA for Ion Trap Design with Daniel Faircloth

    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...

    39 min.

  3. 22 jun

    Electrons on Superfluid Helium with Nick Farina

    EeroQ is unusual in two ways. It's the only company in the world commercializing electrons-on-helium qubits, a modality first proposed by Platzman and Dykman in Science in 1999. And it was founded by Nick Farina — a software entrepreneur, not a physicist — who got pulled into the field through a Chicago theater board where he met his future co-founder, then-PhD student Johannes Pollanen. This conversation matters now because EeroQ has had an unusually productive twelve months: a Physical Review X paper demonstrating single-electron control above 1 Kelvin, a January 2026 result on controlling up to a million electrons with fewer than 50 control lines, and — published in Nature Physics on June 15, 2026 — the first demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, the cavity-QED readout-and-control link the platform depends on. If you're trying to understand which "second-tier" modalities deserve serious attention — and how a small, capital-light team in Chicago is thinking about scale-first hardware design — this is a useful listen. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com. Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for. What We Get Into How a Chicago theater board led to one of the most unique qubit companies in the fieldWhy electrons-on-helium failed in the early 2000s and why circuit QED, dry fridges, and CMOS now make it viableThe physical picture: a thin superfluid helium film coating a CMOS chip, with electrons trapped a few nanometers above the surface by their own image chargeWhy 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 itThe "build a quantum computer in reverse" philosophy: starting from a million-qubit architecture and working back toward two-qubit gatesHow the "Wonder Lake" chip controls 2,432 future qubit sites today, and why that's an engineering milestone rather than a qubit countHonest framing of where EeroQ actually is: no two-qubit gate demonstrated yet, with a tape-out target of ~10,000 qubits by late 2028Why dipole-dipole gates come first and exchange gates come later, borrowing from the spin qubit playbookThe case that scaling — not qubit quality — has been the field's slowest-moving problem over the last decadeResources & 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...

    42 min.

  4. 15 jun

    Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco

    Why This Episode Matters Sabrina Maniscalco is one of the few people in quantum who has lived the full arc: two decades of academic work on open quantum systems and non-Markovian noise at Palermo, Turku, Edinburgh, and Helsinki, followed by founding Algorithmiq with three of her former researchers after an early Qiskit Camp. That trajectory matters now because Algorithmiq just had a landmark stretch — sole winner of the $2M Wellcome Leap Q4Bio prize for a quantum-enabled cancer drug discovery workflow, an €18M Series B, a global HQ move to Milan, and its Tensor Network Error Mitigation (TEM) function landing in IBM's Qiskit Functions catalog. If you're trying to make sense of where quantum software actually creates value before fault tolerance arrives — and what a credible "trajectory to advantage" looks like when paired with real clients in life sciences — this is a grounded, technically specific conversation with someone building it. EPISODE SPONSOR This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com. Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for. What We Get Into Why a background in open quantum systems and non-Markovian noise turned out to be unusually well-suited to running algorithms on noisy near-term hardwareThe actual science behind the Q4Bio winning workflow: simulating excited-state dynamics of a photosensitizer drug already in Phase II clinical trials, on up to 100 qubitsHow quantum-boosted DMRG works — and why it gives you a built-in benchmark against the best classical method via the bond dimensionThe tradeoff Sabrina would and wouldn't make between more qubits and lower noise, and why neutral atoms' slower sampling rates matter for chemistryWhy even fault-tolerant algorithms like quantum phase estimation still depend on getting state initialization and measurement rightAlgorithmiq's two-product structure: the Digital Quantum Interface (hardware-agnostic infrastructure) and the life sciences application frameworkHow methods built for chemistry are now opening doors into optimization and GenAI — and why that direction emerged from the work, not from a strategy deckWhat the move from Helsinki to Milan signals about the European quantum ecosystem and Algorithmiq's commercial scale-upHow an active learning pipeline is already proposing novel drug variants for synthesis in Prof. Sherri McFarland's labResources & Links Guest & Company Algorithmiq — The company Sabrina co-founded with Guillermo García-Pérez, Matteo Rossi, and Boris Sokolov; quantum software for life sciences and chemistry.Sabrina Maniscalco — University of Helsinki Research Portal — Publication record covering open quantum systems, non-Markovian dynamics, and quantum information.Sabrina Maniscalco — AI for Good Bio — Consolidated bio covering academic roles and advisory positions, including IQOQI Austria and CERN's Quantum Technology Initiative.The Q4Bio Win Algorithmiq Wins $2M Wellcome Leap Q4Bio Prize — Company announcement detailing the photodynamic therapy workflow.Wellcome Leap — Q4Bio Prize Announcement — Funder's perspective on finalists and criteria.IBM Quantum Blog — Q4Bio Finalists — IBM's account of the workflow and quantum-classical integration.Funding & HQ Move Tech.eu — Algorithmiq's €18M Series B and Milan move — Coverage of Italy's largest quantum VC round to date.Quantum Computing Report — Algorithmiq Relocates to Milan — Strategic context including the Q4Bio win and IBM partnership.EU-Startups coverage — Investor lineup and Italy's National Quantum Strategy framing.Quantum Advantage & Tooling IBM Quantum Blog — The Dawn of Quantum Advantage — Includes Algorithmiq's TEM (Tensor Network Error Mitigation) function in the Qiskit Functions catalog.Algorithmiq & IBM Quantum Advantage Tracker — The heterogeneous materials experiment Algorithmiq and IBM put forward as a community benchmark.Silicon Republic interview with Sabrina — Useful prior context on her philosophy of using quantum to simulate quantum systems.Key Quotes & Insights On the foundation of the company's approach: "We learned very early what we thought were the bottlenecks of quantum computers — what you really need to worry about if you want to implement computation at scale." A direct line from Qiskit Camp Vermont to Algorithmiq's product strategy.On Q4Bio, in Sabrina's words: "This molecule is already in Phase II clinical trial. So it's not hydrogen. It's a real molecule." A useful counter to the common critique that quantum chemistry demos still live in toy-model land.On quantum-boosted DMRG (insight): In the worst case, the method matches the best classical technique; in the better case, it outperforms it — and the bond dimension tells you which regime you're in. Built-in benchmarking against the classical baseline.On the hardware tradeoff: Asked whether she'd prefer 100 higher-fidelity qubits or 200 noisier ones, Sabrina's answer is "it depends" — and the explanation about why neutral atoms' lower sampling rates limit chemistry use cases is one of the more concrete things you'll hear on platform tradeoffs.On strategy (insight): New verticals at Algorithmiq are ...

    45 min.

  5. 8 jun

    Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures

    Why This Episode Matters Firgun Ventures launched in late 2025 with a $70M first close anchored by the Qatar Investment Authority and a mandate that doesn't exist anywhere else in the market: lead Series A and B rounds in quantum scale-ups globally. Kris Naudts is a neuroscientist and former Culture Trip founder whose path to quantum runs through a near-fatal medical misdiagnosis. Zeynep Koruturk spent over a decade building the Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative and meeting more than a thousand founders. Both were early angels in what became Quantinuum. If you're trying to understand how quantum companies actually get financed between the lab and the IPO window — or why a specialist fund needed to exist at all — this conversation is one of the clearest views available. It's also a useful frame for founders thinking about what an informed institutional investor actually does in a round. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com. Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for. What We Get Into Why Kris's ALS misdiagnosis became the conviction event that pulled him from media entrepreneurship into quantum investingHow Zeynep's decade at Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative shaped her pattern-matching for deep tech, and where that pattern-matching breaks down in quantumThe structural reason Series A/B is the real bottleneck in quantum financing — and why precede and seed capital is no longer the gap people assume it isHow Firgun underwrites engineering and execution risk after the scientific risk is largely retiredWhy a quantum-specialist fund unlocks soft commitments from larger institutions that otherwise stay on the sidelinesThe role of Firgun's "scientific co-founder" Professor Mete Atatüre and the need for sub-specialist diligence across modalitiesHow Firgun thinks about portfolio construction across silicon-spin/photonic (Photonic Inc.), silicon CMOS (Quantum Motion), and other architectures without picking a qubit winnerWhy a truly global mandate is a feature, not a focus problem, given how concentrated quantum talent is in roughly a dozen ecosystemsHow sovereign capital, US equity-stake announcements, and geopolitical fragmentation are starting to reshape who can invest in whatWhy the binary "fault-tolerant or bust" framing of quantum investing misses the gradient of capability that drives near-term valueResources & Links Guest & Firm Firgun Ventures — The fund's homepage, with the team and "Time to Talk Quantum" podcast featuring the founders' own framing of the market.Firgun Ventures on Crunchbase — Confirms London HQ, global mandate, and Series A/B focus.Fund Launch & Thesis Firgun Ventures Launches $250M VC Fund to Invest in Quantum — The Quantum Insider — Launch details, QIA anchor commitment, and founder backgrounds.Firgun Ventures Launches With $70M for Quantum Tech Innovation — TechFundingNews — Deeper breakdown of the LP roster and market rationale.Firgun Ventures: Scaling Quantum Beyond the Early Stages — Future of Computing — Extended interview with Kris and Zeynep on the Series A/B bottleneck.Portfolio Companies Mentioned Firgun Invests in Photonic Inc. — The Quantum Insider — Firgun's first portfolio investment in DARPA-validated Photonic Inc.Photonic Inc.'s World-First Quantum Teleportation — QC Report — Technical context on the "Entanglement First" silicon-spin/photonic architecture.Photonic Inc. Closes $200M+ Round — The Quantum Insider — Final close at a $2B valuation.Quantum Motion Raises $160M Series C — The Quantum Insider — Firgun's first European investment in silicon CMOS quantum computing.Quantum Motion's Silicon CMOS Approach — Technologies.org — Technical analysis of the CMOS scalability thesis.Key Quotes & Insights Kris on the conviction event: "If you're expecting to die and then you're told you're going to live, you have to rethink it yet again… You can go in the direction of enjoy every day, or you can go in the direction of let's try to do something meaningful with whatever time I have left."Zeynep on the real bottleneck: Pre-seed and seed capital in quantum is no longer the gap — the A and B rounds are. Roughly 40% of companies in the space need that bridge to unlock larger institutional capital, and almost no one is set up to lead it.Kris on diligence limits: No one person can underwrite the full quantum stack. Firgun pairs a "scientific co-founder" with sub-specialists for each modality, because in quantum "no propositions sound stupid" — and that's exactly the problem.Zeynep on the asymmetric bet: Quantum is one of the few areas where geopolitical reality creates a floor under the downside. The West can't afford to lose, which means funding will be there long enough for the right companies to mature.Kris on willing the timeline: "You cannot will it into being. The space will evolve at the pace it is set to evolve with the capital and the talent in it." A useful corrective for anyone pitching a five-year cure-for-Parkinson's roadmap.Related Episodes

    46 min.

  6. 1 jun

    Quantum Book Launch with Yuval Boger

    Why This Episode Matters Yuval has a rare profile in the quantum industry: an M.Sc. in physics from Tel Aviv University, an MBA from Kellogg, two decades as a CEO and CMO in deep tech before quantum, and now the commercial lead at QuEra — the company whose neutral-atom architecture is colocated with NVIDIA H100s inside Japan's ABCI-Q supercomputer and just demonstrated 96 logical qubits from 448 physical atoms in Nature. He also hosts The Superposition Guy's Podcast and has just published Quantum Bits, a comic-book guide to quantum computing. This is a crossover conversation — Sebastian's book A New Quantum Era came out the same week — so the episode reads as two practitioners comparing their explanatory strategies, their reading of the modality race, and their honest forecasts for when a quantum computer becomes genuinely non-simulatable. If you want a candid look at how the commercial side of quantum thinks about hardware timelines, error-correction overhead, and the work of translating physics into procurement, this is the episode. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com. Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for. What We Get Into Why Vladan Vuletić's confidence horizon for neutral atoms expanded from 5 years to 10 years in a single 18-month window — and what changedThe honest case for neutral atoms when wall-clock speed is the obvious weakness: parallelism, algorithmic fault tolerance, and a 2:1 physical-to-logical ratio for quantum memoryWhy "time to solution" — not gate speed — is the metric Yuval thinks the industry should be arguing aboutHow Shor's algorithm went from requiring a million qubits to roughly 30,000, and what that compression means for cryptographically relevant timelinesThe craft problem of explaining quantum without saying "zero and one at the same time" — and why both Yuval and Sebastian refused to use itWhat it took to make a quantum comic funny in German (the German is perfect, the joke is not)Sebastian's read on the modality race: neutral atoms short-term, superconducting mid-term, spin and photonics long-term — and Yuval's pushbackWhy Yuval thinks Sebastian's five-year forecast for a non-simulatable machine is pessimisticThe shift inside QuEra from "95% science, 5% everything else" to a company that has to ship serviceable systems and uptimeHow podcasting becomes a business development tool once the microphone is offResources & Links Guest Links The Superposition Guy's Podcast — Yuval's interview show with quantum CEOs and technical leaders across computing, sensing, and communications.Quantum Bits Comics — Yuval's comic-book guide to quantum computing, including custom editions and multilingual versions.QuEra Computing — The neutral-atom quantum computing company where Yuval serves as Chief Commercial Officer.Yuval's published writing — Aggregated Forbes, HPCwire, and Built In bylines on quantum ROI, workforce, and commercialization.Papers & Articles QuEra and collaborators on Algorithmic Fault Tolerance (Nature, 2025) — The paper behind the claim that syndrome measurements can happen per algorithmic block rather than per operation.HPCwire coverage of the AFT result — Independent take on the 10–100x runtime overhead reduction.IEEE Spectrum on neutral-atom quantum computing in 2026 — Context for the AIST Gemini deployment and Yuval's time-to-solution argument.2026 Quantum Readiness Report, Part 2 — The survey of 291 stakeholders behind Yuval's "show-me phase" framing of the market.Books A New Quantum Era by Sebastian Hassinger — Sebastian's outsider's introduction to quantum computing, referenced throughout the conversation.Quantum Bits: A Comic Book Guide to Quantum Computing by Yuval Boger — Yuval's illustrated explainer, with a glossary covering terms from superposition to QLDPC codes.Background Reading Mentioned The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder — Sebastian's inspiration for the working title of his next book.Key Quotes & Insights On the magic of neutral atoms: "We've got this rubidium atoms, we hold them in place using tiny lasers, they're four microns apart, we shoot lasers, and then we take a photograph and see how they're doing. It's science fiction until it isn't."On the modality timeline (Yuval, paraphrasing Vladan Vuletić): Eighteen months ago Vladan was confident about neutral atoms for the next five years. Six months ago, after recent results, that confidence horizon stretched to ten.On what actually matters: "Obviously what matters is time to solution and not clock speed." Yuval's core rebuttal to the standard critique that neutral-atom gates are slow.On the error-correction compression: A recent Harvard result showed the physical-to-logical qubit ratio for quantum memory dropping toward roughly 2:1 — not the thousand-to-one figure that dominates most public discourse.On the takeaway from his book (Yuval): "Quantum is magical, but it's not magic."Related Episodes Episode 18 — Neutral atom arrays with Alex Keesling of QuEra Computing — Sebastian's earlier conversation with QuEra's CEO on the foundational technology.

    55 min.

  7. 25 mei

    Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias Christandl

    Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias Christandl Why This Episode Matters Most discussions of fault tolerance quietly assume a classical-in, classical-out picture: you feed in bits, the noisy quantum machine does its work, and a stable classical answer comes out the other side. Christandl — a mathematically trained quantum information theorist who also leads a Novo Nordisk Foundation–funded life sciences center — argues that this framing is too narrow for the era we are actually entering, where multi-core processors, networked QPUs, and quantum communication links all need to exchange quantum information between noisy machines. If you care about how quantum networks, distributed quantum computers, and quantum simulation workflows for chemistry and biology actually get built, this episode lays out a foundational way of thinking about the problem and connects it directly to current hardware and algorithm co-design. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It’s time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com. Go deeper with the blog post. What We Get Into Why the fault tolerance theorem as usually stated leaves out the case that matters most for networking: quantum inputs and quantum outputs.How Christandl's group shows you can still prepare arbitrarily complex quantum states on a noisy machine, paying only one final layer of physical noise rather than collapsing the whole computation.What this means for restoring meaning to quantum channel capacity results in the presence of noisy encoders and decoders.Why distributed quantum computing — multi-core QPUs talking to each other in quantum, not classical, information — is the natural setting for this work.How recent quantum LDPC code work fits in, and why the team is now focused on making encoders and decoders more space-efficient.Christandl's debate with Gil Kalai: which skeptical assumptions are worth taking seriously, and which he thinks the fault tolerance machinery is robust against.The Quantum for Life workflow: zooming in on the quantum-relevant region of a protein–ligand interaction, running a small quantum simulation, and feeding the result into a classical machine-learning pipeline that needs many such small computations.Why "co-design" has replaced "bridging the gap" as the right metaphor for where quantum hardware and quantum software meet.How quantum sensing — for example, magnetic-field sensing with atomic clouds — could one day deliver genuine quantum inputs into a fault-tolerant quantum computer.Resources & Links Guest Links Matthias Christandl — University of Copenhagen Research Portal — Official institutional profile with publications and affiliations.Quantum for Life Center — University of Copenhagen — The Novo Nordisk Foundation–funded center Christandl leads, focused on quantum algorithms for the life sciences.UCPH Quantum Hub launch — The cross-faculty quantum community Christandl helped found at the University of Copenhagen.Christandl appointed 2024 Turing Chair — CWI/QuSoft — Background on his honorary visiting chair at QuSoft and CWI in Amsterdam.Papers & Articles Fault-Tolerant Coding for Quantum Communication (arXiv:2009.07161) — The foundational paper (IEEE TIT 2024, with Müller-Hermes) that motivates the episode: channel coding when the encoder and decoder circuits themselves are noisy.Fundamental Limit on the Power of Entanglement Assistance in Quantum Communication (arXiv:2408.17290) — Christandl and collaborators settle a 2002 conjecture of Bennett et al. on entanglement-assisted capacity (PRL 2025).Asymptotic tensor rank is characterized by polynomials (arXiv:2411.15789) — STOC 2025 result connecting tensor theory to the matrix multiplication exponent.How to Use Quantum Computers for Biomolecular Free Energies (2026)More Quantum Chemistry with Fewer Qubits — Physical Review Research (2024) — The Quantum for Life paper underlying the protein–ligand workflow discussed in the episode.A Cornerstone of Entanglement Theory Restored — Nature Physics (2025) — Christandl's News & Views on the re-proof of the generalized quantum Stein's lemma.Quantum Duel: Matthias Christandl x Gil Kalai Key Quotes & Insights On reframing fault tolerance: Christandl argues that the fault tolerance theorem, as usually stated, assumes classical inputs and outputs — but the most important near-term use cases, from networked QPUs to multi-core processors, need quantum inputs and quantum outputs.On the unavoidable final layer of noise: "There will always be a final layer of noise being applied" when a noisy machine prepares a quantum state — and that single layer, not the whole computation, is the real price you pay.On the new metaphor: "A few years back, I would have told you the really important thing is bridging the gap between the hardware and the software. Now it's not anymore about bridging the gap. It's about working together."On Kalai's skepticism: Christandl finds the debate clarifying rather than threatening — the fault tolerance techniques look robust to the noise-model perturbations skeptics raise, and the engineering question is which code, not whether codes work at all.On what quantum advantage in life sciences might actually look like: Not one heroic simulation, but many small, exact quantum computations feeding training data into a much larger classical machine-learning workflow that predicts protein–ligand interactions.Related Episodes

    39 min.

  8. 18 mei

    Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull

    Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull Why This Episode Matters Elise Crull is Associate Professor of Philosophy at CCNY and the CUNY Graduate Center, co-author with Guido Bacciagaluppi of The Einstein Paradox (Cambridge, 2024), and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2025 for her archival work recovering voices like Grete Hermann from the foundations of quantum mechanics. She was also one of the speakers on Helgoland in June 2025 for the centenary of quantum mechanics — opening, as Sebastian notes, by thanking the organizers for the courage to invite a philosopher. This conversation matters because the truce between physicists and philosophers of physics is over. Quantum computing has turned interpretive questions — what counts as entanglement, what decoherence really is, whether causal order can be put in superposition — into engineering questions with budget consequences. If you build, fund, or write about quantum hardware, this episode will sharpen how you hear the words being used around you. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It’s time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com. Go deeper with the blog post. What We Get Into Why "decoherence" and "noise" are not interchangeable, and why error correction strategy depends on telling them apartThe six-plus working definitions of entanglement currently circulating in physics — and why "classical entanglement" makes a philosopher's eye twitchWhat Einstein actually objected to in EPR (hint: it wasn't really determinism), drawn from Schrödinger's "Einstein-Paradoxon" correspondence folderIndefinite causal ordering: whether the experimental speedups reflect genuinely acausal physics or our stubbornly classical definitions of "cause" and "signal"How monogamy of entanglement is only monogamous with respect to a single degree of freedom — and why that nuance is already being exploited in entanglement harvestingWhy "it's just a tool" is the most insidious thing an engineer can say about quantum or AI technologyHow the standard heroic-origin story of quantum mechanics structurally erased experimentalists — many of them women like Hertha Sponer — and what that pattern predicts about quantum computing's own emerging origin storyWhat Grete Hermann did to von Neumann's impossibility proof forty years before anyone listenedWhy Crull thinks the next physical theory, whatever succeeds quantum field theory, is likely to be stranger, not tamerResources & Links Guest Links Elise Crull — CCNY Faculty Profile — Her institutional home, with current research interests and talks.Elise Crull — CUNY Graduate Center Profile — Full publications list including forthcoming work.Elise Crull — Academia.edu — Preprint archive, including her 2024 Leggett–Garg/Feyerabend paper and earlier decoherence work.Books & Papers The Einstein Paradox (Bacciagaluppi & Crull, Cambridge UP, 2024) — The archival reconstruction of the debate EPR unleashed; the centerpiece of the conversation.Ryckman's BJPS review of The Einstein Paradox (2025) — A scholarly assessment of what the book changes about how we read 1935."Realism with Quantum Faces: The Leggett–Garg Inequalities as a Case Study for Feyerabend's Views" (Crull, 2024) — Her most recent standalone article on macroscopic realism."Physics Scratches a Philosopher's Itch" — APS Physics (2022) — A feature on her work on indefinite causal ordering and causation.Helgoland & History Physics World: Helgoland 2025 — the Inside Story — Post-event report on the centenary where Sebastian and Elise first met.AIP: "What Happened on Helgoland" — Historiographical pushback on the Heisenberg origin myth.AIP: Crull on Hertha Sponer and the path to wave/particle duality (2026) — Her most recent piece on how standard histories minimize experimentalists.For General Audiences StarTalk: "The Philosophy of Physics with Elise Crull" (June 2025) — Crull with Neil deGrasse Tyson, kicking off the Einstein Paradox promotion cycle.StarTalk: "How Quantum Physics Complicates Objective Truth" (April 2026) — A complementary, more recent treatment of the same themes.Key Quotes & Insights On what philosophy is for: "Every aspect of science we do requires interpretation, because the world isn't just out there. We make choices about how to encounter it."On decoherence vs. noise: Crull notes the question physicists at Duke recently raised with her — how do you tell the difference between decoherence and noise? — and stresses that one is something you shield against, the other is something else entirely. Error correction strategy depends on the distinction.On what really bothered Einstein: Despite the popular story, "He wasn't as concerned about determinism as you would think." What Einstein wanted was a theory whose mathematics had a one-to-one mapping to individual systems with their own states — and entanglement broke that.On indefinite causal order: Experimentalists often equate causation with signaling constraints, but "those are very different things." The superposition-of-causal-orders results may reveal less about causation than about the fact that temporal ordering itself remains defined in irreducibly classical ways.

    42 min.
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Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, interviews brilliant research scientists, software developers, engineers and others actively exploring the possibilities of our new quantum era. We will cover topics in quantum computing, networking and sensing, focusing on hardware, algorithms and general theory. The show aims for accessibility - Sebastian is not a physicist - and we'll try to provide context for the terminology and glimpses at the fascinating history of this new field as it evolves in real time.

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