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.

This conversation matters now because EeroQ has had an unusually productive twelve months: a Physical Review X paper demonstrating single-electron control above 1 Kelvin, a January 2026 result on controlling up to a million electrons with fewer than 50 control lines, and — published in Nature Physics on June 15, 2026 — the first demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, the cavity-QED readout-and-control link the platform depends on. If you're trying to understand which "second-tier" modalities deserve serious attention — and how a small, capital-light team in Chicago is thinking about scale-first hardware design — this is a useful listen.

Sponsor

This 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 The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for.

What We Get Into

• How a Chicago theater board led to one of the most unique qubit companies in the field
• Why electrons-on-helium failed in the early 2000s and why circuit QED, dry fridges, and CMOS now make it viable
• The physical picture: a thin superfluid helium film coating a CMOS chip, with electrons trapped a few nanometers above the surface by their own image charge
• Why EeroQ pivoted from motional states to spin qubits after Steve Lyon (Princeton) joined as CTO — and the predicted 10+ second coherence times that come with it
• The "build a quantum computer in reverse" philosophy: starting from a million-qubit architecture and working back toward two-qubit gates
• How the "Wonder Lake" chip controls 2,432 future qubit sites today, and why that's an engineering milestone rather than a qubit count
• Honest framing of where EeroQ actually is: no two-qubit gate demonstrated yet, with a tape-out target of ~10,000 qubits by late 2028
• Why dipole-dipole gates come first and exchange gates come later, borrowing from the spin qubit playbook
• The case that scaling — not qubit quality — has been the field's slowest-moving problem over the last decade

Resources & Links

Guest & Company

• EeroQ — Company site for the only commercial electron-on-helium quantum hardware effort.
• EeroQ Publications — Peer-reviewed papers and preprints from the team.
• Building a Quantum Computer in Reverse (EeroQ Blog, July 2023) — Farina's own articulation of the scale-first design philosophy discussed in the episode.

Key Papers

• Koolstra, Glen, Beysengulov et al., "Strong coupling of a microwave photon to an electron on helium," Nature Physics, June 2026 — First demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and the quantized motional state of a single electron on helium, including observation of vacuum Rabi splitting — establishing the cavity-QED readout link at the heart of EeroQ's architecture. This result was under embargo when the episode was recorded.
• Castoria et al., "Sensing and Control of Single Trapped Electrons Above 1 Kelvin," Physical Review X (2025) — The 1 K result Nick references; demonstrates charge sensing but not yet coherent spin manipulation.
• Koolstra et al., "High-impedance Resonators for Strong Coupling to an Electron on Helium," Physical Review Applied (Feb 2025) — The resonator architecture underlying EeroQ's cQED control approach.
• Electron-on-helium qubit (Wikipedia) — Useful overview including the original 1999 Platzman & Dykman Science proposal and Steve Lyon's 2006 spin-qubit paper in Physical Review A.

Press & Context

• EeroQ Makes World-First Breakthrough in Electron Qubits Floating on Helium (EeroQ, June 2026) — Company announcement of the Nature Physics strong-coupling result.
• EeroQ Solves the "Wire Problem" (PRNewswire, Jan 2026) — The million-electrons / fewer-than-50-wires result Nick cites.
• Individual electrons trapped and controlled above 1 K (Phys.org) — Independent coverage of the PRX paper.
• EeroQ Achieves Tape-Out of "Wonder Lake" Chip (The Quantum Insider, July 2023) — Background on the 2,432-site CMOS chip discussed in the episode.

Ecosystem

• Chicago Quantum Exchange — The regional consortium EeroQ benefits from.
• Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park — The state-backed quantum park anchored in Chicago.

Key Quotes & Insights

• On the contrarian thesis: "Scaling is actually the hardest part of building a quantum computer." Nick argues the field has made real strides on gate fidelity, error correction, and algorithms over the last decade — but not nearly enough on the path to hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits.
• On building in reverse: Rather than starting from a two-qubit gate and "hoping and praying to find ways to scale," EeroQ started by asking what a million-qubit processor would have to look like — which forced the choice of CMOS as the only manufacturing technology humanity has ever used to build features at that scale.
• On honest status: "We d...