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

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

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

By: Sebastian Hassinger
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Summary

 Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, interviews brilliant research scientists, software developers, engineers and others actively exploring the possibilities of our new quantum era. We will cover topics in quantum computing, networking and sensing, focusing on hardware, algorithms and general theory. The show aims for accessibility - Sebastian is not a physicist - and we'll try to provide context for the terminology and glimpses at the fascinating history of this new field as it evolves in real time.(c) New Quantum Era, LLC 2026 Physics Science
Episodes
  • The Quantum Control Stack with Niels Bultink

    The Quantum Control Stack with Niels Bultink
    May 11 2026
    Why This Episode MattersNiels 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.SponsorThis 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 IntoWhy the IBM Quantum Experience originally needed a meter of rack equipment per qubit, and what had to change architecturally to scale past thatHow 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-haveThe role of Qblox's SYNQ and LINQ protocols in achieving picosecond-level synchronization and low-latency feedback across hundreds of coresWhy FPGAs are the right substrate today, and why the field will need to move toward ASICs as production volumes growThe strategic logic behind manufacturing Fermilab's open-source QICK platform — and how it complements rather than cannibalizes the Qblox ClusterWhat the Quantum Utility Block partnership with QuantWare and Q-CTRL actually delivers, including a full-stack demo built in a weekend at APS March MeetingWhy Qblox opened a Boston HQ and started U.S. manufacturing in Canton, Massachusetts in 2026, and how geopolitics is reshaping quantum supply chainsNiels's read on which qubit modalities are gaining ground fastest right now — including a notable jump in spin qubits and neutral atomsWhat's special about the Dutch quantum ecosystem, and why a value-chain culture produced multiple revenue-driven hardware companiesResources & LinksGuest & CompanyQblox — Delft-based control stack company at the center of this episodeNiels Bultink on Google Scholar — Niels's research record from his QuTech years, useful background on his feedback control workQblox North America HQ announcement — Context for the Boston expansion discussed in the episodeQblox "Made in America" manufacturing announcement — Background on the Canton, MA manufacturing milestonePartnerships DiscussedFermilab × Qblox QICK partnership announcement — The DOE-backed deal for Qblox to manufacture and distribute QICKQuantum Utility Block press release — Joint reference system with QuantWare and Q-CTRL referenced in the episodeAPS 2024 full-stack demo recap — The 48-hour conference-floor build Niels mentionsFoundational Paper"Feedback Control of a Solid-State Qubit Using High-Fidelity Projective Measurement" — Ristè, Bultink et al., the 2012 work that grounds Niels's perspective on real-time controlFunding & Market ContextQblox Series A announcement — Context for the revenue-first growth story discussedThe Quantum Insider on the Series A — Independent coverage with quotes from QuantonationKey Quotes & InsightsOn 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 ...
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    37 mins
  • Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy

    Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy
    May 4 2026
    Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar MedalsyIzhar 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 Elements in 2023 with Daniel Lidar (USC) and Amir Yacoby (Harvard). That arc — nanoscale measurement scientist turned deep-tech operator — shapes how he thinks about the simulation gap in quantum computing.The conversation lands at a specific moment. In April 2026, Quantum Elements published a joint result with AWS, USC, and Harvard simulating a distance-7 rotated surface code with 97 physical qubits using full quantum master equations on AWS HPC7a, and announced a deeper collaboration with Rigetti Computing on next-generation superconducting processors. If you care about how error correction strategies, decoders, and pulse-level controls actually get developed before they ever touch hardware, this episode is for you.EPISODE SPONSORThis 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.comGo deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for====================================================================================================What We Get IntoWhy generic noise models fall short and what "hardware-faithful" actually means when two nominally identical QPUs have different noise fingerprintsHow Quantum Elements scaled open-system master-equation simulation from a brute-force ceiling around 16 qubits to 97 qubits using stochastic compression on top of Quantum Monte CarloThe compute reality of the distance-7 surface code run on AWS HPC7a — only 96 vCPUs and a few hundred gigabytes of memory, not the thousands of vCPUs they initially fearedWhy decoders are the invisible bottleneck in fault tolerance, and where AI-trained decoders fed by digital twin data could plausibly run inside the real-time quantum-classical loopExtending error suppression from physical qubits up to logical qubits — the IBM Eagle work where digital-twin-guided strategies reportedly took entangled logical qubit fidelity from 43% to 95%How the same digital twin approach extends to neutral atoms (live today) and ion traps (on the roadmap)What Rigetti gets out of the partnership, what it means to have Chad Rigetti on the board, and how Constellation fits alongside real hardware timeIzhar's "wooden models in the air tunnel" critique of how the quantum industry currently iterates — and what a parallel virtual development track buys youResources & LinksGuest & CompanyIzhar Medalsy — Quantum Elements team page — Background and role at Quantum Elements.Izhar Medalsy on LinkedIn — Full career arc from ETH biophysics through 3D printing to quantum.Quantum Elements — Constellation platform, where listeners can build their own virtual QPU and run circuits, error suppression, and QEC experiments.Papers & ArticlesAWS Quantum Computing Blog: Decoding realistic QEC syndrome with Quantum Elements digital twins — Primary technical reference for the 97-qubit distance-7 result discussed in the episode.The Next Platform: How HPC and AI Digital Twins Accelerate Quantum Error Correction (Apr 17, 2026) — Independent reporting on the AWS/USC/Harvard simulation.The Quantum Insider: Quantum Elements & Rigetti collaboration (Apr 21, 2026) — Details on the partnership Izhar describes.Guest post: Quantum Digital Twins — The Missing Acceleration Layer — Izhar's own framing of the thesis.The Next Platform: Startup Profile of Quantum Elements (Jan 2026) — Background on the company.arXiv 2603.14607 — Calibration-Based Digital Twins for IBM Quantum Hardware — Useful independent context on the limits and promise of calibration-based twins.Key Quotes & Insights"Sometimes when I look at the quantum industry, there are instances where you think, well, it's almost like building the next fighter jet with wooden models in the air tunnel." — Izhar's framing for why the field needs a real simulation layer.On hardware awareness: each modality, each QPU, sometimes each calibration cycle has its own pulses, its own noise processes, and its own failure modes. You cannot build the control stack without modeling where you are starting from and where you are trying to get to.Insight: The brute-force ceiling for open-system master-equation ...
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    38 mins
  • Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch

    Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch
    Apr 27 2026
    Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan DeutschIvan 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: trapping individual atoms in optical lattices, cooling them to near absolute zero, and shuttling them in parallel to perform quantum logic. The companies commercializing those ideas today — QuEra, Pasqal, Atom Computing, Infleqtion, and the newly announced Aurora out of Caltech — are building on architectural concepts that trace directly to his group's early papers. His 9,600+ citations across quantum information, atomic physics, and quantum control place him among the most-cited theorists in the field.The reason to talk to Ivan now is that he has been making a quietly heterodox argument: every one of those commercial platforms encodes information in two energy levels of an atom that has ten or sixteen, and Ivan thinks the field should be asking whether that's the right choice — not for information density, which is only a logarithmic gain, but for fault tolerance. This conversation goes deep on qudits, spin cat codes, and the co-design philosophy that has shaped Ivan's career at the interface between theory and experiment, ions and neutral atoms, and academia and industry. If you are following neutral-atom hardware, fault-tolerant quantum error correction, or the emergence of regional quantum ecosystems, this episode is essential.What You'll LearnWhy neutral atoms were the "underdog cousins" of trapped ions — and the precise trade-off at the heart of a 30-year rivalry: ions are great and terrible because they're charged; neutral atoms are great and terrible because they're neutralWhat the original neutral-atom quantum computing paper actually got right: the parallel atom-movement architecture now central to QuEra, Atom Computing, and Infleqtion's roadmaps was already there — even if the Rydberg blockade's full power wasn't appreciated until laterWhat qudits are and why fault tolerance, not information density, is the compelling argument: the information gain from base-2 to base-10 is only logarithmic, but co-designing error-correcting codes with the physical structure of the hardware may be transformativeHow spin cat codes work: using the extra energy levels inside a single atom for error redundancy, directly analogous to bosonic cat codes in microwave cavities, with fault-tolerant thresholds that may surpass standard qubit surface codesWhy biased error correction matters: real physical errors in neutral atoms aren't arbitrary, and codes designed around the dominant error channels — including leakage and erasure — can dramatically outperform worst-case generic schemesHow leakage becomes an asset: when population escapes the qubit subspace into other levels, detecting that escape converts it from an unknown error into an erasure error, which is far easier to correctWhy working at interfaces is where the creative work happens: Ivan's career has been built at the boundary between theory and experiment, between ion-trap and neutral-atom communities, and now between research and industryHow New Mexico became a quantum hub: the founding of QNM-I, the partnership with Colorado, and the Elevate Quantum Tech Hub — turning decades of national-lab and university strength into an actual industrial ecosystemResources & LinksGuest LinksIvan Deutsch — CQuIC Faculty Page — Research profile and publication list at the Center for Quantum Information and Control at UNMGoogle Scholar Profile — 9,600+ citations across quantum information, atomic physics, quantum optics, and quantum controlNSF Q-SEnSE Research Profile — Ivan's role in the NSF quantum sensing and engineering centerKey PapersQuantum optimal control of ten-level nuclear spin qudits in Sr-87 (LANL/CQuIC) — The theoretical demonstration of arbitrary SU(10) maps in strontium-87 with average fidelity ~0.9992; the core technical result behind the qudit computing program discussed in the episodeSpin-cat code paper (ResearchGate) — The fault-tolerant encoding proposal that embeds a qubit in a large-spin qudit, analogous to bosonic cat codes; fault-tolerant thresholds that surpass standard qubit-based encodingsTalks & ContextIMSI Talk — "Neutral Atom Quantum Computing with Nuclear Spin Qudits" — Ivan's accessible lecture-format talk on the full qudit computing research program; a good companion to the episodeQuanta Magazine Q&A with Ivan Deutsch (2015) — Still the most accessible public articulation of his philosophy on qudits and computationEcosystemQuantum New Mexico Institute Launch (Jan 2024) — The founding of the joint UNM/Sandia/LANL institute Ivan establishedUNM/QNM-I Ecosystem Update (Feb 2026) — The current state of the New Mexico ...
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    45 mins
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