The New Quantum Era

Silicon qubits get better as you add more of them — that's the core claim from Michelle Simmons, and she has the results to back it. Two Nature papers, 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, a 15,000-site analogue simulator, and a fault-tolerance roadmap set in 2014 that's running ahead of schedule.

Open source contributors are quietly shaping the quantum computing industry — writing the tools, frameworks, and libraries that researchers and companies actually use. That dynamic deserves more serious analysis than it gets. A new post looks at who these communities are and why they matter.

Google's HPC team sits at the intersection of classical supercomputing and quantum systems — and they're already thinking hard about what hybrid workflows actually look like in practice. A candid panel conversation about where the quantum horizon really sits from the people building toward it.

Microsoft went from buying a building to pumping a dilution refrigerator down to 14 millikelvin in roughly five months. That's the pace Corey Stambaugh is running at Maryland's Capital of Quantum — and this conversation, recorded during the week it all came together, is the clearest account of how…

A quantum PNT sensor that 'can't get wet' — and what happens when you try to waterproof it without destroying its precision advantage. Isabella Martinez of Booz Allen Hamilton on why operationalization is the stage the quantum field talks about least, and why she recruits criminologists onto…

Quantum computers from different vendors can't talk to the same software stack — yet. A proposed standard interface could change that, giving developers a hardware-agnostic way to write quantum applications. Think USB, but for qubits.

Fujitsu's tin-vacancy diamond-spin prototype isn't a new qubit modality — it's a photonic interconnect designed to link separate dilution refrigerators. Meanwhile, their STAR architecture achieves ~10x accuracy gains over its predecessor without changing the underlying surface code. Dr.

Most quantum VCs can't read the physics. Marie Lepske can — and she backed Qnami before it became one of the field's rare clean sensing exits. She's candid about what makes her say no: strong science with no credible path to market, and SPAC roadmaps that only look real if you can't evaluate them.

A peer-reviewed paper in PNAS predicts Shor's algorithm will fail at a few hundred error-corrected qubits — not from engineering limits, but because Hilbert space itself may be subtly wrong. Oxford's Tim Palmer argues quantum mechanics should be built on rational numbers, not the continuum.

Spin-qubit hardware built for quantum computers might be 100,000× more energy-efficient than CMOS for classical logic — no new algorithms required. Daniel Loss, who proposed the spin qubit in 1997, lays out the physics and the first falsifiable experiments to test it.

Individual layers of Meta's Llama 3.1 8B are running on a 156-qubit IBM quantum processor right now — not a simulation, an actual inference step. Román Orús, the physicist who co-invented the tensor network math making this possible, explains what it proves and what it doesn't.

Germany is the biggest gainer of quantum talent over the last two years. The US is among the biggest losers. That finding comes from a solo software engineer in Poland who built a continuously updated intelligence platform ingesting the entire quant-ph archive — and it's more rigorous than…

A single laptop may contain hundreds of cryptographic components — and most enterprises haven't inventoried even a fraction of them. Richard Entrup of KPMG makes the case that the migration problem is already urgent, before anyone knows when Q-Day arrives. The supply chain angle alone is sobering.

HRL's 2026 QPU paper isn't a fidelity story — it's a systems story. The qubit chip, the cryo-CMOS controller at 4 K, and a new superconducting ribbon cable are all one integrated unit. That reframe is central to understanding what IBM actually acquired.

KPMG is a named co-author on a peer-reviewed quantum ML paper — and their lead quantum researcher says the real post-quantum cryptography problem isn't cryptographic. It's that enterprises don't know where their data flows.

We're measuring quantum progress with the wrong ruler. This episode unpacks why the metrics the field defaults to may be obscuring more than they reveal — and what better yardsticks might look like.

Oratomic skipped the intermediate product entirely — straight to fault tolerance, 20,000 qubits, $300M Series A. Barak Bussel of 7i Capital explains why that bet makes sense, how resource estimates for Shor's algorithm have compressed from 20 million physical qubits to roughly 500,000, and what a…

New on The New Quantum Era: New podcast episode - Kate Timmerman on who actually builds the U.S. quantum supply chain

A significant chunk of quantum components are single-sourced and imported — and that quiet fragility is already slowing product delivery at real companies. Kate Timmerman explains what the $55M Bloch Tech Hub award actually targets, and why small Midwest manufacturers are the unlikely next link in…

Demonstrating the requisite bravery, well done, Science. “The Trump administration hates academic science funding…They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.”

About 40% of full-time quantum open-source contributors are unpaid. Ben Castanon, Unitary Foundation's first CEO, makes the case that this is a structural problem — not a motivation problem — and explains what a Linux-style substrate for quantum would actually require.

New episode of The New Quantum Era: Quantum Cameras and Sub-Diffraction Imaging with Johannes Galatsanos

Google's 2019 quantum supremacy experiment turned out to be a starting line, not a finish line. For episode 100, Sebastian reflects on what 99 conversations — from Josephson junctions to fault tolerance to regional ecosystems — actually taught him about where this field stands.

Trapped-ion engineers have been squeezing designs through EM solvers built for radar, not for confining single atoms. Daniel Faircloth left hardware to fix that. The result: nanometer ion-height accuracy and 5× memory reduction — purpose-built for X-junctions and shuttling voltage precision.

Single electrons floating nanometers above superfluid helium, controlled via the same cavity-QED toolkit as superconducting qubits — that's EeroQ's bet. Their new Nature Physics paper just demonstrated strong coupling between a microwave photon and one of those electrons.

New on The New Quantum Era: Book launch (and sale!)

Algorithmiq simulated excited-state dynamics of a Phase II clinical trial photosensitizer — not hydrogen, a real cancer drug — on up to 100 qubits, and won the $2M Wellcome Leap Q4Bio prize for it.

Algorithmiq simulated excited-state dynamics of a Phase II clinical trial drug on 100 qubits — and won the $2M Wellcome Leap Q4Bio prize for it. Not hydrogen. A real molecule. https://www.newquantumera.com/podcast/quantum-drug-discovery-and-the-path-to-advantage-with-sabrina-maniscalco

Series A and B rounds are where quantum companies stall — not seed. Firgun Ventures built a $250M fund specifically to c... https://www.newquantumera.com/podcast/funding-the-quantum-middle-series-a-b-capital-with-kris-naudts-and-zeynep-koruturk-of-firgun-ventures-with-kris-naudts-and-zeynep-koruturk

The standard fault tolerance theorem quietly assumes a classical answer comes out the other side. Matthias Christandl joins me on The New Quantum Era podcast to discuss what's possible when you challenge that assumption. Listen to our new episode www.newquantumera.com/podcast/faul...

The book is out!! a.co/d/09uV7RIF

New on The New Quantum Era: Elise Crull: When Philosophy Becomes an Engineering Problem https://www.newquantumera.com/blog/elise-crull-when-philosophy-becomes-an-engineering-problem/

New episode of The New Quantum Era: Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull https://www.newquantumera.com/podcast/philosophy-of-physics-meets-quantum-engineering-with-elise-crull

New episode of The New Quantum Era: The Quantum Control Stack with Niels Bultink https://www.newquantumera.com/podcast/the-quantum-control-stack-with-niels-bultink

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy. Have a listen:

New on The New Quantum Era: Beginner's mind The uncertainties faced in this very early stage of the quantum technology industry offers few clear answers to questions about when useful applications will emerge or even what those applications will... https://www.newquantumera.com/blog/beginners-mind/

Wise words from Garnet Chan on quantum computing and chemistry. www.newquantumera.com/podcast/quan...

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch. Have a listen:

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Quantum Chemistry's Classical Limits with Garnet Chan. Have a listen:

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat. Have a listen:

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Benchmarking Quantum Simulation with Arnab Banerjee. Have a listen:

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Quantum Advantage Achieved with Dominik Hangleiter. Have a listen:

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Scaling Quantum Hardware Like Semiconductors with Matthijs Rijlaarsdam. Have a listen:

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Engineering the Quantum Future with Brian Gaucher. Have a listen:

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Quantum Engineering with David Reilly and Tom Ohki. Have a listen:

I wrote a piece for my newsletter, about the open standard I want to help the quantum community create www.newquantumera.com/blog/why-i-j...

New podcast episode up! I discuss the Illinois quantum ecosystem with Harley Johnson, CEO of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park. If you listen and have comments, reply to this post! www.newquantumera.com/podcast/the-...

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Quantum LDPC error correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster. Have a listen:

🎙️ Just published a new episode of The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Our Quantum Future with Evan Kubes. Have a listen: