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

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 in...

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 Resear...

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 conv...

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 stret...

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...

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 p...

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 F...

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 o...

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, b...

Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy Izhar Medalsy is not a career qubit theorist. His path runs from a physical chemistry PhD and an ETH Zurich postdoc in atomic force microscopy and ternary nanoscale logic, through productizing scientific instruments at Bruker, through building one of the fastest resin 3D printers on the market, into co-founding Quantum Elemen...

Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch Ivan Deutsch is Distinguished Regents' Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico and the founding director of CQuIC, the Center for Quantum Information and Control. Along with his longtime collaborator Poul Jessen, Ivan helped lay the theoretical foundations for neutral-atom quantum computing in the 1990s: trapp...

Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, is joined on this episode by Garnet Chan, the Bren Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and among the most cited computational chemists in the world (34,000+ Google Scholar citations). Garnet is neither a quantum computing booster nor a dismissive skeptic. He's a theorist who works at the exact boundary between what classi...

Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat In this special live-streamed discussion, Will Zeng, co-founder of the Unitary Foundation, and Ziyaad Bhorat, VP at the Mozilla Foundation, join host Sebastian Hassinger to unpack their co-authored white paper, The Open Foundation Quantum Technology Needs . The paper argues that open source quantum software is structurally underfunded — too appl...

Summary This episode is for anyone following the quantum utility debate or curious about how quantum computers will actually contribute to scientific discovery. Arnab Banerjee — assistant professor at Purdue, guest scientist at Oak Ridge's Quantum Science Center, and one of the most-cited experimentalists working at the intersection of quantum materials and quantum computing — walks us through his...

Has quantum advantage actually been achieved — or is the field still arguing over its own milestones? Dominik Hangleiter, one of the leading theorists working on quantum computational advantage, joins the podcast to make the case that it has, explain why so many physicists remain unconvinced, and map the path toward fault-tolerant, verifiable quantum advantage. Why This Episode Matters If you foll...

Scaling Quantum Hardware Like Semiconductors with Matthijs Rijlaarsdam The quantum computing industry has been stuck at roughly 100 qubits for years — not because of physics, but because of wiring. Matthijs Rijlaarsdam, co-founder and CEO of QuantWare, explains how his company's 3D vertical chip architecture (VIO) could break through that ceiling to 10,000 qubits by 2028, and why the quantum indus...

Ever wonder why quantum computing still feels like a "cool science experiment" instead of a deployable technology? After two decades building wireless standards and quantum systems at IBM, Brian Gaucher argues that engineering—not physics—has become the critical bottleneck holding back quantum technologies from real-world impact. Why this episode matters This conversation is essential for anyone t...

Revolutionary Quantum Engineering with David Reilly and Tom Ohki Have you ever wondered what it takes to build computing systems that work at temperatures colder than outer space? David Reilly and Tom Ohki are tackling this exact challenge, leading a "special ops" team of engineers from their unique position at Emergence Quantum—the startup born from Microsoft's Station Q program. They're not just...

From Steel Mills to Quantum Scale-Up: Inside Illinois's Bold Bet on the Future of Computing What does it take to build the world's largest dedicated quantum technology park — on the site of a former steel mill? Harley Johnson is leading that effort, and the answer involves equal parts materials science, economic development, and a 30-year bet on quantum that's finally paying off. Why This Episode...

Breaking Down RSA: How QLDPC Codes Cut Quantum Computing Requirements by an Order of Magnitude What if I told you that the number of qubits needed to break RSA encryption just dropped from over a million to around 100,000? That's exactly what researchers at Iceberg Quantum achieved by combining quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) error correction with algorithmic optimizations—potentially acc...

How a Lawyer and a Listicle Launched One of Quantum's Most Influential Media Platforms Evan Kubes had no physics degree, no engineering background, and no idea what a qubit was when he stumbled across a press release about AWS investing in quantum. What he did have was experience translating complex industries for mainstream audiences — and within months, he and co-founder Alex Challans had turned...

What does it take to build a thriving quantum ecosystem from the ground up? Martin Laforest, physicist-turned-venture-capitalist at Quantacet, reveals how Quebec transformed a 1970s academic bet into a $400M quantum powerhouse—and why the industry's biggest misconception is thinking quantum computing is either a science problem or an engineering problem when it's clearly both. Summary In this conv...

What if consciousness isn’t generated by the brain, but emerges from its interaction with a ubiquitous quantum field? In this episode, Sebastian Hassinger and theoretical physicist Joachim Keppler explore a zero‑point field model of consciousness that could reshape both neuroscience and quantum theory. Summary This conversation is for anyone curious about the “hard problem” of consciousness, quant...

What happens when a former elite gymnast with “weak math and science” becomes dean of one of the world’s most influential quantum engineering schools? In this episode of *The New Quantum Era*, Sebastian Hassinger talks with Prof. Nadya Mason about quantum 2.0, building a regional quantum ecosystem, and why she sees leadership as a way to serve and build community rather than accumulate power. Summ...

Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, talks with Alumni Ventures managing partner Chris Sklarin about how one of the most active US venture firms is building a quantum portfolio while “democratizing” access to VC as an asset class for individual investors. They dig into Alumni Ventures’ co‑investor model, how the firm thinks about quantum hardware, software, and sensing, and why quantum should be viewed...