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

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

Sebastian Hassinger 95 Episodes Jun 29, 2026

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.

Episodes

Quantum EDA for Ion Trap Design with Daniel Faircloth Jun 29, 2026 2322 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 Te
Electrons on Superfluid Helium with Nick Farina Jun 22, 2026 2526 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.T
Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco Jun 15, 2026 2709 Why This Episode MattersSabrina 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 landma
Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures Jun 8, 2026 2762 Why This Episode MattersFirgun 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 K
Quantum Book Launch with Yuval Boger Jun 1, 2026 3274 Why This Episode MattersYuval 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 fr
Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias Christandl May 25, 2026 2326 Fault Tolerance for Quantum Inputs and Outputs with Matthias ChristandlWhy This Episode MattersMost 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 No
Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise Crull May 18, 2026 2539 Philosophy of Physics Meets Quantum Engineering with Elise CrullWhy This Episode MattersElise 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 founda
The Quantum Control Stack with Niels Bultink May 11, 2026 2235 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 ca
Hardware-Faithful Digital Twins for Quantum Computing with Izhar Medalsy May 4, 2026 2293 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 Quantu
Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch Apr 27, 2026 2716 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 1990
Quantum Chemistry's Classical Limits with Garnet Chan Apr 20, 2026 2473 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 wh
Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat Apr 17, 2026 3735 Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad BhoratIn 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 — t

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