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

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

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What We Get Into

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

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

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

Papers & Articles Discussed in This Episode

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

Models & Products

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

Funding & Company Context

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

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

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

What We Get Into

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

Resources & Links

Guest Links

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

Papers & Reports

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

Tools & Platforms

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

Recognition

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We Get Into

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

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

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

Reports & Research

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

Ecosystem & Events

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

Independent Coverage

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

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

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

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

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

Related Episodes

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

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

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

What We Get Into

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

Resources & Links

Guest

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

Papers & Articles

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

Acquisition & IBM Strategy

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

Tools & Platforms

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

Organizations

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

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

What We Get Into

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

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

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

Papers & Research

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

PQC & Enterprise Frameworks

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

Related Coverage & Commentary

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

Related Episodes

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

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

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

What We Get Into

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

Resources & Links

Guest & Organizations

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

The Oratomic Round and Recent Breakthroughs

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

Policy and Market Context

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

UCLA Research Park and Regional Ecosystem

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

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

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

What We Get Into

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

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

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

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

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

Workforce & Economic Development

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

Programs & Tools Mentioned

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

Related Episodes

• Ep. 82 — The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson — The complementary conversation on IQMP, the physical infrastructure that Kate's ecosystem work plugs into.
• Ep. 75 — Regional quantum development with Alejandra Y. Castillo — Former EDA leadership on the policy logic behind Tech Hubs and inclusive regional innovation.

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

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

What You'll Learn

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

Resources & Links

Guest & Organization

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

Papers & Reports

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

Tools & Programs

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

Ecosystem

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

Related Episodes

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

Stay in the Ecosystem

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

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

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

What You'll Learn

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

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

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

Papers & Reports

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

Press & Coverage

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

Sponsor

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

Related Episodes

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

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

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

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What You'll Learn

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

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Resources & Links

Guest & Host Links

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

The Book & Documentary

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

Episodes & Guests Referenced

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

Key Institutions & Ecosystem

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

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

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

What We Get Into

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

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

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

Product & Technical Resources

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

Papers & Background Reading

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

Company & Funding Context

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

Key Quotes & Insights

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

Related Episodes

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