Welcome to the 79th episode of “Decode Quantum”. We continue our “international episodes”, this times with the cofounders of the US startup EeroQ, Nick Farina and Johannes Pollanen, which aims to create qubits with electron spins, electrons being shielded from controlling electronic circuits by a layer of superfluid helium. This is the only company doing this.

Nick Farina is the CEO and co-founder of EeroQ in 2017. Beforehand, he worked as an business angel investor, and an entrepreneur, launching multiple tech startups (GiftedHire for online job search, Voltage Digital a digital agency, JetZet providing itinerary management tools to business travelers). He’s the one bringing business acumen to the company. He is also a Quantum Computing Governance Member at the World Economic Forum since 2021. In 2000-2003, he was a caddie at a golf club (Biltmore Country Club) where he spent summers watching people cheat at golf and lament their losses in tech stocks.

Johannes Pollanen is a co-founder and the Chief Science Officer of EeroQ. He is a researcher from Michigan State University (MSU) where he holds the Cowen chair of Distinguished Chair in Experimental Physics. He is also Associate Director of the MSU Center for Quantum Computing Science and Engineering. He runs the Laboratory for Hybrid Quantum Systems, which is focused on hybrid quantum technologies involving superconducting qubits, superfluids, trapped electrons, and other condensed matter systems. He developed the EeroQ electrons on superfluid helium architecture. He did his PhD at Northwestern University with Bill Halperin and contributed to the discovery of new quantum phases in superfluid helium-3, which influenced his later work in designing quantum computing platforms. He then was a post-doc at Caltech, with Jim Eisenstein, working on exotic many-body states in ultra-clean semiconductor systems.

And as usual the transcript : 

https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2025/decode-quantum-with-nick-farina-and-johannes-pollanen-from-eeroq

Welcome to the 78th episode of Decode Quantum, where we continue to travel around the world. We are now in the UK with Sebastian Weidt, the founder and CEO of Universal Quantum, a startup creating scalable trapped-ions quantum computers.

Sebastian Weidt is the CEO and co-founder of Universal Quantum since 2019, when the company was created. He is also a professor of quantum computing and entrepreneurship at the University of Sussex, which is in Brighton, south of London, near the Channel. He was a lecturer on quantum technology at this university. He was a postdoc research fellow at the same university between 2013 and 2015, and since 2015, a senior scientist in the trapped-ion group led by Winfried Hensinger.

Transcrit and details : https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2024/decode-quantum-with-sebastian-weidt-from-universal-quantum

Welcome to the 77th episode of “Decode Quantum”. We continue our “international episodes”, this times with the cofounders of the US startup SEEQC,John Levy (CEO) and Oleg Mukhanov (CTO), who are creating superconducting control electronic circuits for solid state qubits. They are the only company in that field. We had a chance to meet our two guests in Elmsford in February this year and visit their lab and cleanroom.

John Levy is the CEO and cofounder of SEEQC in 2019. Beforehand, he was the chairman of Hypres, the company that spun-out SEEQC for reasons he’ll explain later. He was involved in various startups, like goTenna, and BioLite. He has been an investor and executive in the tech industry, having co-founded and led the tech practice at the venture capital firm L Capital Partners where he served on boards of over twelve tech companies. John took 3 companies public and oversaw numerous M&A transactions. During the 1990’s he co-founded the computer vision company ePlanet which spun out of Interval Research, sponsored by Paul Allen, and ran the company for Intel, its main investor.  John is a graduate of the Harvard Business School.

Oleg Mukhanov, is a cofounder and the CTO of SEEQC. He was before the CTO of Hypres since 1991, where he led developments in superconducting electronics. Oleg is a co-inventor of the Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) technology, a superconducting circuit used for high-speed, energy-efficient computation useful for both classical and quantum processors. He did his PhD in Russia with Konstantin Likharev in the late 1980s, at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), before moving to the US at the end of the USSR.

Welcome to the 76th episode of Decode Quantum. In our series of episodes recorded in Lindau where dozens of physics Nobel laureates meet with young scientists, we picked a few of them who are specialized in the broad field of quantum computing to head their thoughts about it, Caroline Tornow, Francesca Pietracaprina, Yaroslav Herasymenko and Adam Shaw.

This podcast was recorded on July 1st, 2024, in Lindau, Germany during the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings 2024 with Fanny Bouton (OVHcloud) and Olivier Ezratty.

Caroline Tornow is from ETH Zurich and just started a PhD in the Condensed Matter Theory and Metamaterials group. Beforehand, during her Master’s in Quantum Engineering at ETH, she worked in the Quantum Computational Science group at IBM Research Zurich and the Quantum Information Theory group at ETH. She therefore has some ideas on where we are with regards to the maturity of quantum computing in general, and, we would guess, also with superconducting qubits.

Francesca Pietracaprina is a software engineer and researcher at Algorithmiq, a quantum computing software company based in Helsinki Finland. She did her PhD in between statistical and quantum physics and two postdocs in Rome and Toulouse where she focused on localization in quantum systems, a phenomenon that involves a breakdown on thermalization in presence of strong disorder. She then obtained a Marie Curie fellowship with which she moved to Dublin and continued her research on quantum disordered systems and quantum thermodynamics. At Algorithmiq, she is focused on creating full stack solutions for drug discovery and simulation.

Yaroslav Herasymenko is a post-doc at TU Delft and at QuSoft in Amsterdam. He did his PhD at the University of Leiden. He currently works on the development of fermionic (in other words, of electrons) quantum simulations.  He started to work in condensed matter theory and then became interested in math and computing methods of condensed matter. It drove him to the field of quantum computing. He is a native from Kyiv, Ukraine.

Adam Shaw has a PhD in physics in 2024 from Caltech, where he studied quantum computing with Rydberg atom arrays. He is part of the team who broke recent records with the control of 6,100 atoms using lasers, working on both experimental and theoretical aspects to these systems, working on gate fidelities, large scale quantum simulation, and showing how certain quantum errors can be erased. He is now a post-doc at Stanford, still working on cold-atoms computing.

More details and transcript on : https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/decode-quantum-with-young-scientists-at-lindau

Welcome to the 75th episode of the Decode Quantum podcast. In our series of episodes recorded in Lindau where dozens of physics Nobel laureates met with young scientists, we had a chance to meet Bill Phillips, who is one of them, after the first episode with David Wineland.

This podcast was recorded on July 1st, 2024, in Lindau, Germany during the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 2024.

Bill Phillips is American physicist from the same generation as Alain Aspect. He got his PhD in physics at the MIT working on nuclear magnetic resonance on the magnetic moment of the proton in H2O. He later did some work with Bose–Einstein condensates and then worked at NIST. There, he developed (actually, used) a technique to trap cold atoms in vacuum using lasers, called the Magneto-Optical Trap (MOT), in connection with an idea from Jean Dalibard, who was our previous guest. Bill is also a professor of physics at the University of Maryland. He was a laureate from the Nobel prize in physics in 1997 along with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, at the relatively early age of 49, by today’s standards. It was for his work on the Zeeman slower and other techniques related to the cooling and trapping of atoms. He was also participating in the panel on the future of quantum computing with Olivier Ezratty at the Lindau conference. By the way, his mother was Italian, and he happens to speak French.

The transcript from the podcast published on Olivier Ezratty’s website has been edited by Bill Phillips and Olivier Ezratty. It is slightly different from the podcast audio recording to clarify the discussion content.

https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2024/decode-quantum-with-bill-phillips

Welcome to the 75th episode of the Decode Quantum podcast. In our series of three episodes recorded in Lindau where dozens of physics Nobel laureates were gathered with young scientists, we had a chance to meet David Wineland.

This podcast was recorded on July 1st, 2024, in Lindau, Germany during the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.

David Wineland is an American physicist currently at the University of Oregon who is specialized in atomic physics, and in particular, uses laser-cooled trapped ions to implement the elements of quantum-computing. He became a laureate of the Nobel prize in physics in 2012 along with Serge Haroche of Ecole Normale Supérieure and Collège de France, Paris. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1970 on a topic we’ll see later in our discussion. He was then a post-doc at the University of Washington where he worked on electrons in ion traps. In 1975, he joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where he created a group working on ion storage and was also an academic at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He and his colleagues were among the first {laser cooling was demonstrated at the same time by the group of Peter Toschek in Heidelberg} to laser-cool ions in 1978 and then demonstrated other optical techniques to control ions and implement the first two-qubit logic gate in 1995. He and colleagues also worked on the creation of the most precise atomic clock using quantum logic on a single aluminum ion in 2019. The 2005 experiment was the first demonstration of quantum-logic spectroscopy. The most precise quantum logic clock using an Al+ (aluminum) ion was demonstrated in 2019. This work later contributed to the creation of trapped ion quantum computers from the companies IonQ and Quantinuum.

The transcript from the podcast published on Olivier Ezratty’s website has been edited by David Wineland and Olivier Ezratty. It is slightly different from the podcast audio recording to clarify the discussion content.

https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2024/decode-quantum-with-david-wineland