• 43 minutes 47 seconds
    The Open Source Substrate for Quantum with Ben Castanon

    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

    Papers & Reports

    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

    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

    Stay in the Ecosystem

    ...
    20 July 2026, 1:51 pm
  • 49 minutes 24 seconds
    Quantum Cameras and Sub-Diffraction Imaging with Johannes Galatsanos

    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

    Press & Coverage

    Sponsor

    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

    13 July 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 1 hour 19 minutes
    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 field
    • How Sebastian's journey into quantum began: arriving at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in 2017 to help with Qiskit's open source strategy, encountering the 53-qubit milestone, and recognizing the earliest stages of an emerging technology that would become his life's work
    • What the "Heroic Age of Qubits" was — and why it ended: the period of genius PIs racing to prove quantum advantage, culminating in Google's 2019 random circuit sampling claim, and why that finish line turned out to be a starting line
    • What Harley Johnson and the IQMP reveal about ecosystem-building: why the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is the world's leading example of building a quantum ecosystem, and what it takes to bridge deep science and economic development
    • What Quebec's DistriQ teaches about sustainability: the 90% public / 10% private funding model designed to flip over ten years, and why that benchmark matters for every regional hub
    • Why Alejandra Castillo's economic development lens changed the picture: how quantum's impact extends far beyond qubits into advanced manufacturing, supply chain, and the communities that get to participate in the upside
    • What Nadya Mason's leadership model means for the field: the dean of UChicago's Pritzker School who wasn't a "math person" and sees leadership as service — and why the field needs every kind of creative mind, not just PhDs in physics
    • What John Martinis's arc from the 1986 Josephson junction paper through the Nobel Prize to CoLab reveals: the transition from heroic-era physicist to systems thinker pursuing open architecture and consortium-based quantum computing
    • Why the Monte Carlo algorithm is the key analogy for quantum's future: the technique that took 30 years to find its commercial application as a reminder that the most important uses of quantum computers haven't been imagined yet
    • Where fault tolerance actually stands: why it's an emergent property of the whole system — not a single breakthrough — and why the classical-quantum feedback loop for mid-circuit measurement and syndrome correction is the thing to watch
    • Why multiple qubit modalities will coexist: the case for neutral atoms in the near term, superconducting and spin qubits in the long term, and photonics as a dark horse — and why this isn't a winner-take-all race
    • What Build Quantum Partners is building: a new venture to reduce friction for quantum companies entering the U.S. market, partner with regional ecosystems, and ultimately develop the quantum equivalent of biotech hub infrastructure

    ---

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Host Links

    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

    Key Institutions & Ecosystem

    6 July 2026, 12:11 pm
  • 38 minutes 42 seconds
    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

    Product & Technical Resources

    Papers & Background Reading

    Company & Funding Context

    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

    29 June 2026, 1:05 pm
  • 42 minutes 6 seconds
    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 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

    Key Papers

    Press & Context

    Ecosystem

    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...
    22 June 2026, 12:33 pm
  • 45 minutes 9 seconds
    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 hardware
    • The actual science behind the Q4Bio winning workflow: simulating excited-state dynamics of a photosensitizer drug already in Phase II clinical trials, on up to 100 qubits
    • How quantum-boosted DMRG works — and why it gives you a built-in benchmark against the best classical method via the bond dimension
    • The tradeoff Sabrina would and wouldn't make between more qubits and lower noise, and why neutral atoms' slower sampling rates matter for chemistry
    • Why even fault-tolerant algorithms like quantum phase estimation still depend on getting state initialization and measurement right
    • Algorithmiq's two-product structure: the Digital Quantum Interface (hardware-agnostic infrastructure) and the life sciences application framework
    • How methods built for chemistry are now opening doors into optimization and GenAI — and why that direction emerged from the work, not from a strategy deck
    • What the move from Helsinki to Milan signals about the European quantum ecosystem and Algorithmiq's commercial scale-up
    • How an active learning pipeline is already proposing novel drug variants for synthesis in Prof. Sherri McFarland's lab

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Company

    The Q4Bio Win

    Funding & HQ Move

    Quantum Advantage & Tooling

    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 ...
    15 June 2026, 2:03 pm
  • 46 minutes 2 seconds
    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 investing
    • How Zeynep's decade at Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative shaped her pattern-matching for deep tech, and where that pattern-matching breaks down in quantum
    • The structural reason Series A/B is the real bottleneck in quantum financing — and why precede and seed capital is no longer the gap people assume it is
    • How Firgun underwrites engineering and execution risk after the scientific risk is largely retired
    • Why a quantum-specialist fund unlocks soft commitments from larger institutions that otherwise stay on the sidelines
    • The role of Firgun's "scientific co-founder" Professor Mete Atatüre and the need for sub-specialist diligence across modalities
    • How Firgun thinks about portfolio construction across silicon-spin/photonic (Photonic Inc.), silicon CMOS (Quantum Motion), and other architectures without picking a qubit winner
    • Why a truly global mandate is a feature, not a focus problem, given how concentrated quantum talent is in roughly a dozen ecosystems
    • How sovereign capital, US equity-stake announcements, and geopolitical fragmentation are starting to reshape who can invest in what
    • Why the binary "fault-tolerant or bust" framing of quantum investing misses the gradient of capability that drives near-term value

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Firm

    • Firgun Ventures — The fund's homepage, with the team and "Time to Talk Quantum" podcast featuring the founders' own framing of the market.
    • Firgun Ventures on Crunchbase — Confirms London HQ, global mandate, and Series A/B focus.

    Fund Launch & Thesis

    Portfolio Companies Mentioned

    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

    8 June 2026, 12:22 pm
  • 54 minutes 34 seconds
    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 changed
    • The honest case for neutral atoms when wall-clock speed is the obvious weakness: parallelism, algorithmic fault tolerance, and a 2:1 physical-to-logical ratio for quantum memory
    • Why "time to solution" — not gate speed — is the metric Yuval thinks the industry should be arguing about
    • How Shor's algorithm went from requiring a million qubits to roughly 30,000, and what that compression means for cryptographically relevant timelines
    • The craft problem of explaining quantum without saying "zero and one at the same time" — and why both Yuval and Sebastian refused to use it
    • What it took to make a quantum comic funny in German (the German is perfect, the joke is not)
    • Sebastian's read on the modality race: neutral atoms short-term, superconducting mid-term, spin and photonics long-term — and Yuval's pushback
    • Why Yuval thinks Sebastian's five-year forecast for a non-simulatable machine is pessimistic
    • The shift inside QuEra from "95% science, 5% everything else" to a company that has to ship serviceable systems and uptime
    • How podcasting becomes a business development tool once the microphone is off

    Resources & Links

    Guest Links

    • The Superposition Guy's Podcast — Yuval's interview show with quantum CEOs and technical leaders across computing, sensing, and communications.
    • Quantum Bits Comics — Yuval's comic-book guide to quantum computing, including custom editions and multilingual versions.
    • QuEra Computing — The neutral-atom quantum computing company where Yuval serves as Chief Commercial Officer.
    • Yuval's published writing — Aggregated Forbes, HPCwire, and Built In bylines on quantum ROI, workforce, and commercialization.

    Papers & Articles

    Books

    Background Reading Mentioned

    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

    1 June 2026, 2:54 pm
  • 38 minutes 46 seconds
    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

    Papers & Articles

    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

    25 May 2026, 11:00 am
  • 42 minutes 19 seconds
    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 apart
    • The six-plus working definitions of entanglement currently circulating in physics — and why "classical entanglement" makes a philosopher's eye twitch
    • What Einstein actually objected to in EPR (hint: it wasn't really determinism), drawn from Schrödinger's "Einstein-Paradoxon" correspondence folder
    • Indefinite causal ordering: whether the experimental speedups reflect genuinely acausal physics or our stubbornly classical definitions of "cause" and "signal"
    • How monogamy of entanglement is only monogamous with respect to a single degree of freedom — and why that nuance is already being exploited in entanglement harvesting
    • Why "it's just a tool" is the most insidious thing an engineer can say about quantum or AI technology
    • How the standard heroic-origin story of quantum mechanics structurally erased experimentalists — many of them women like Hertha Sponer — and what that pattern predicts about quantum computing's own emerging origin story
    • What Grete Hermann did to von Neumann's impossibility proof forty years before anyone listened
    • Why Crull thinks the next physical theory, whatever succeeds quantum field theory, is likely to be stranger, not tamer

    Resources & Links

    Guest Links

    Books & Papers

    Helgoland & History

    For General Audiences

    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.
    18 May 2026, 12:00 pm
  • 37 minutes 15 seconds
    The Quantum Control Stack with Niels Bultink

    Why This Episode Matters

    Niels Bultink earned his PhD at QuTech under Leonardo DiCarlo, where he performed some of the first real-time feedback experiments on solid-state qubits — the foundational primitive behind quantum error correction. He spun Qblox out of TU Delft in 2018, and has grown it to roughly 140 people serving 150+ customers worldwide, mostly on revenue rather than venture capital, before raising a $26M Series A in 2024.

    This conversation matters now because the goalposts for useful quantum computing have moved closer in the last 12 months. Recent estimates suggest breaking RSA may need ~10,000–100,000 qubits, not tens of millions — and at that scale, the control stack is no longer a lab afterthought. It is a strategic supply chain question, which is why the DOE just picked Qblox to manufacture Fermilab's QICK platform domestically. If you care about how quantum computers actually get built — the layer between the qubit and the software — this is the episode for you.


    Sponsor

    This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It’s time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.
    Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.

    Go deeper with the blog post.


    What We Get Into

    • Why the IBM Quantum Experience originally needed a meter of rack equipment per qubit, and what had to change architecturally to scale past that
    • How a quantum control stack can be genuinely qubit-agnostic — and where modality differences actually live (mostly in the analog front end, not the digital core)
    • Why pre-compiled pulse sequences hit a wall, and how dynamic, adaptive control is a prerequisite for fault tolerance, not a nice-to-have
    • The role of Qblox's SYNQ and LINQ protocols in achieving picosecond-level synchronization and low-latency feedback across hundreds of cores
    • Why FPGAs are the right substrate today, and why the field will need to move toward ASICs as production volumes grow
    • The strategic logic behind manufacturing Fermilab's open-source QICK platform — and how it complements rather than cannibalizes the Qblox Cluster
    • What the Quantum Utility Block partnership with QuantWare and Q-CTRL actually delivers, including a full-stack demo built in a weekend at APS March Meeting
    • Why Qblox opened a Boston HQ and started U.S. manufacturing in Canton, Massachusetts in 2026, and how geopolitics is reshaping quantum supply chains
    • Niels's read on which qubit modalities are gaining ground fastest right now — including a notable jump in spin qubits and neutral atoms
    • What's special about the Dutch quantum ecosystem, and why a value-chain culture produced multiple revenue-driven hardware companies

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Company

    Partnerships Discussed

    Foundational Paper

    Funding & Market Context

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On why the control stack is more than picks and shovels: "Sometimes companies like us are called picks and shovels. It's a nice analogy, but it doesn't hold entirely. The qubits are just the bottom layer of the stack — and all the other layers are also crucial to develop."
    • On flexibility as a requirement, not a feature: Pre-compiled, rigid sequences can't support quantum error correction. Adaptive, real-time control flows aren't a performance upgrade — they're "a basic need for this new era of quantum fault tolerance."
    • On the moving goalposts for useful quantum computing: A year ago, breaking RSA looked like tens of millions of qubits. Recent estimates put it at 10,000–100,000 — "a factor hundred smaller what we now think we need versus a year ago."
    • On the future of FPGAs: FPGAs are the right substrate for today's flexibility, but already at current production volumes, "it makes more sense to put things in chips, in ASICs."
    • On the Dutch ecosystem: What sets Delft apart isn't a slogan about ecosystems but a value-chain culture — companies that focus on one layer, work together, and grow on customer revenue rather than venture rounds.

    Stay in the Ecosystem

    11 May 2026, 12:30 pm
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