Entangled Things

In Episode 145, Fred Chong returns to discuss what's new at Infleqtion, now a public company, and the work that's keeping him busy across both academia and industry. The team dig into Quantum for Bio, a multimodal cancer biomarker discovery project developed with Welcome Leap and now continuing with IBM, where hybrid quantum-classical algorithms are uncovering relationships between genes, RNA, and tumor imaging that classical methods haven't been able to tackle. Fred shares Peter Shor's perspective that the shortage of quantum algorithms reflects a shortage of good machines, not a shortage of ideas, and why that's an optimistic take. The conversation also covers neutral atoms as a maturing modality, Infleqtion's dual-species machine and how it reduces the need for physical qubit movement, and the concept of interleaving error-corrected qubit tiles to reduce long-range communication costs.

In Episode 144, Todd Brun, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Physics at the University of Southern California, returns to break down where quantum error correction stands today. The team cover the transition from theoretical thresholds to real experimental demonstrations, why decoding latency matters as much as code quality, and the counterintuitive insight at the heart of quantum error correction — that you can measure what went wrong without measuring the data itself. Todd also weighs in on the trade-offs between modalities when it comes to implementing error correction in hardware, and closes with a look at how far the field has come since the early nineties when quantum computing was just an idea.

In Episode 143, Patrick and Ciprian break down Microsoft's Majorana 2 announcement and what it means for the future of topological quantum computing. The team cover the physics behind the tetron architecture, why switching from aluminum to lead in the nanowire construction matters, and what coherence times north of twenty seconds — and in some cases a full minute — represent for the field. The conversation weighs Microsoft's history of playing close to the vest, the DARPA program backing the approach, and the newly aggressive 2029 commercial timeline. Patrick and Ciprian also disclose their long history as Microsoft partners and VPs, and close with a broader look at where the modality race stands heading into what may be the final stretch of the NISQ era.

In Episode 142, Yuping Huang, CEO and Chairman of Quantum Computing Inc and Physics Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, joins Patrick and Ciprian to make the case for photonics, not just as a modality, but as a philosophy. QCI's approach starts with the physics rather than mapping quantum onto classical architecture, leading to machines that look nothing like what most people expect a quantum computer to look like. Yuping walks through the deceptively hard problem of deterministically generating entangled photon pairs, why you don't need a million entangled photons to build something useful, and why QCI operates entirely at room temperature, if it can't fit in a backpack, it won't end up in users' hands. The conversation closes on Neural Wave, a hybrid photonic-digital system that offloads computation into the optical domain and cuts AI energy consumption by orders of magnitude.

In Episode 141, Mike Piech, Vice President of Business Development at Rigetti Computing, joins Patrick and Ciprian to talk hardware. Rigetti recently announced their 108-qubit system and is targeting 99.5% two-qubit gate fidelity by end of year, with a thousand physical qubits in sight by 2029. Mike breaks down why superconducting qubits are built on decades of semiconductor manufacturing know-how, what the Josephson junction actually does and why non-linearity is the key to isolating a usable qubit state, and why a macroscopic circuit behaving quantumly is one of the more remarkable phenomena in modern physics. The conversation also covers Rigetti's international work — including a 36-qubit system at the UK National Quantum Computing Centre and a new 108-qubit deployment in India with CDAC. The time to start learning quantum is now.