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

Odcinki

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  Building the U.S. Quantum Supply Chain with Kate Timmerman 27.07.2026 41min

  Days after the CQE-led Bloch Quantum Tech Hub secured $55 million from the U.S. Economic Development Administration to build a domestic quantum supply chain, Kate Timmerman joins Sebastian to explain what that money actually does — and why the Midwest, not Silicon Valley, may become the industrial backbone of American quantum technology. This conversation goes deep on quantum ecosystem building, workforce development, and the choke points in single-sourced components that keep quantum startups from scaling.
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  The Open Source Substrate for Quantum with Ben Castanon 20.07.2026 43min

  What does it take to build durable open-source infrastructure for a field that hasn't yet delivered on its biggest promises? Ben Castanon, the first-ever CEO of Unitary Foundation, joins Sebastian to talk about the structural funding gap facing quantum open-source software, why nearly 40% of full-time contributors go uncompensated, and what a "Linux for quantum" would actually require. It's a candid conversation about community, memberships from companies like NVIDIA and IBM, and the case for treating open tooling as public infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.
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  Quantum Cameras and Sub-Diffraction Imaging with Johannes Galatsanos 13.07.2026 49min

  What if a camera could skip the JPEG entirely and process photons at the speed of light, extracting information that conventional optics leave on the table? Diffraqtion co-founder and CEO Johannes Galatsanos joins Sebastian to explain how a quantum-inspired imaging device — built on quantum Fisher information theory — can see beyond the diffraction limit and run neural network classifications directly in the photonic domain. It's a candid conversation about what "quantum" really means in quantum sensing, why space is the first market, and what quantum sensing needs to break out of quantum computing's shadow.
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  Episode 100: Live at Barnes & Thornburg — Reflections on the First 100 Episodes 06.07.2026 1godz 19min

  For the 100th episode of The New Quantum Era, the microphone turns around. Bob Karr — partner at Barnes & Thornburg, co-chair of the firm's Quantum Technology Industry Group, and lead architect of the *Quantum Law Navigator* — invited Sebastian to Chicago for a live audience recording at the firm. In front of scientists, investors, policymakers, and students, Bob leads a wide-ranging conversation about what 99 episodes and a new book have taught Sebastian about where quantum technology actually stands, what building a foundation of understanding in an emerging field really requires, and what comes next — including the Helgoland documentary, the evolution of quantum ecosystems, and the launch of Build Quantum Partners. ---
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  Quantum EDA for Ion Trap Design with Daniel Faircloth 29.06.2026 38min

  What if the bottleneck in scaling trapped-ion quantum computers isn't the qubits or the lasers, but the design software underneath them? Daniel Faircloth, PhD, co-founder and CTO of Nullspace, joins Sebastian to explain why ion trap engineers have been forced to bend legacy electromagnetic solvers around problems they were never built for — and what changes when you build a simulator from scratch for the physics of confining single atoms. It's a conversation about the quiet emergence of a quantum EDA layer, the engineering work that turns hardware roadmaps into reality, and why nanometer-precise ion height predictions are harder than they sound.
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  Electrons on Superfluid Helium with Nick Farina 22.06.2026 42min

  What if the path to a million-qubit processor doesn't run through silicon defects or massive wire bundles, but through single electrons floating a few nanometers above a film of superfluid helium? Nick Farina, co-founder and CEO of EeroQ, joins Sebastian to explain why his team bet a decade on the only commercial electron-on-helium quantum computing platform — and what their recent results, including a new *Nature Physics* paper demonstrating strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, suggest about scaling, coherence, and the "wire problem."
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  Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco 15.06.2026 45min

  What does it actually take to run a quantum-classical workflow on a real cancer drug — not hydrogen, not a toy molecule, but a photosensitizer already in Phase II clinical trials? Sabrina Maniscalco, CEO and co-founder of Algorithmiq, joins Sebastian to unpack the science behind the company's Wellcome Leap Q4Bio win, its €18M raise, and its move from Helsinki to Milan. Along the way: error mitigation, tensor networks, sampling tradeoffs across hardware platforms, and an honest look at where quantum advantage in chemistry might actually land.
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  Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures 08.06.2026 46min

  Quantum computing has plenty of seed-stage capital and a handful of growth-stage giants — but the Series A and B rounds in between are where promising companies stall. In this episode, Sebastian sits down with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk, co-founders of Firgun Ventures, the first VC firm built specifically to fund quantum scale-ups, to talk about why that middle stage is so hard to underwrite, what they learned as early Cambridge Quantum Computing angels, and how they're deploying a $250M fund across computing, sensing, and communications.
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  Quantum Book Launch with Yuval Boger 01.06.2026 54min

  Yuval Boger — Chief Commercial Officer of QuEra Computing and one of quantum's most prolific podcasters — joins Sebastian for a crossover episode that doubles as a working session between two people trying to make quantum computing comprehensible. They compare notes on writing books for non-physicists, debate how close neutral-atom systems are to genuine quantum utility, and dig into why the gap between physical and logical qubits is narrowing far faster than most public roadmaps suggest.
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  Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias Christandl 25.05.2026 38min

  What happens to fault tolerance when a quantum computer's job is not to spit out a classical answer, but to produce a quantum state that gets sent somewhere else — to another core, another machine, or across a network? Mathias Christandl, professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Quantum for Life Center, walks Sebastian through a reframing of the fault tolerance theorem for quantum input and quantum output, and what that shift means for distributed quantum computing, channel capacities, and the practical path to useful quantum simulation in the life sciences.
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  Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull 18.05.2026 42min

  What does philosophy of science actually *do* for quantum technology at the moment quantum mechanics is being asked to deliver? Elise Crull — historian, philosopher of physics, and 2025 APS Fellow — joins Sebastian to talk about how interpretive choices are quietly built into quantum hardware, why definitions of entanglement and decoherence matter for engineering, and what archival work on EPR, Grete Hermann, and Hertha Sponer reveals about the stories quantum computing tells itself today.
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  The Quantum Control Stack with Niels Bultink 11.05.2026 37min

  Every quantum computer — superconducting, spin, trapped ion, or neutral atom — depends on a layer most people never see: the precisely timed electronics that play qubits like a microwave-frequency piano and read the answers back. Niels Bultink, co-founder and CEO of Qblox, joins Sebastian to explain why the quantum control stack has become a strategic bottleneck for scaling quantum hardware, and how a Delft spinout is building the picks-and-shovels of fault-tolerant quantum computing while expanding into the U.S. through a Boston headquarters, U.S. manufacturing in Massachusetts, and a partnership with Fermilab on the open-source QICK platform.
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  Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy 04.05.2026 38min

  Quantum hardware iteration is gated by the simple fact that real QPUs are expensive, scarce, and noisy in ways that generic simulators don't capture. In this episode, Izhar Medalsy, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Elements, explains why the industry is still building "wooden models in the air tunnel" — and how hardware-faithful digital twins, scaled to a distance-7 rotated surface code with 97 physical qubits on AWS HPC, could give pulse engineers, circuit designers, and QEC decoder teams a faster, cheaper place to iterate.
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  Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch 27.04.2026 45min

  Every commercial neutral-atom quantum computer today encodes information in just two energy levels of an atom that has many more — strontium has ten nuclear-spin levels, cesium has sixteen. Ivan Deutsch, one of the founding theorists of neutral-atom quantum computing, joins the podcast to ask whether binary is really the right base for quantum computation, and to make the case for spin cat codes: a fault-tolerant encoding that embeds a qubit inside the richer structure of a qudit, the way bosonic cat codes use microwave cavities. Along the way, Ivan traces three decades at UNM — from the earliest days of quantum information science to his role building Elevate Quantum, the only federally designated quantum Tech Hub in the United States.
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  Quantum Chemistry's Classical Limits with Garnet Chan 20.04.2026 41min

  One of the most-cited arguments for near-term quantum advantage in chemistry just got a rigorous classical answer — from one of the world's leading quantum chemists. Garnet Chan's group at Caltech solved the FeMo-cofactor ground-state energy problem classically, to chemical accuracy, using tensor networks and coupled cluster methods. If you've heard that quantum computers are uniquely needed to simulate nitrogen fixation, this episode will sharpen — and complicate — that picture.
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  Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat 17.04.2026 1godz 2min

  Quantum computing is drawing billions in investment, but the open source software layer that could make it all work is falling through the cracks. Who fills that gap — and why should philanthropy care?
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  Simulating Quantum Materials with Arnab Banerjee 07.04.2026 40min

  Can a quantum computer reproduce what happens when you fire neutrons at a magnetic crystal? Arnab Banerjee, the experimentalist who discovered the first signatures of a Kitaev quantum spin liquid, just proved it can — benchmarking IBM's Heron processor against real neutron scattering data from national laboratories. This is what quantum utility looks like when it's grounded in decades of experimental physics.
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  Quantum Advantage Achieved with Dominik Hangleiter 01.04.2026 37min

  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.
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  Scaling Quantum Hardware Like Semiconductors with Matthijs Rijlaarsdam 23.03.2026 37min

  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 industry needs to start thinking like the semiconductor industry if it wants to actually deliver on its promises.
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  Engineering the Quantum Future with Brian Gaucher 16.03.2026 40min

  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.