Quantum.Tech USA 2025 Blog

I lead the Quantum Services practice line in North America, along with my colleagues Niko Mohr and Henning Soller in Europe, where I explore the business of quantum, the impacts that it will drive across industries and how the roadmap to get to quantum adoption shifts with research advancements, government actions and industry value.

As a seasoned entrepreneur, engineer, and angel investor, Dr Paul Terry specialises in emerging technologies advising venture capitals and governments on economic, technical, health and national defence strategies. Ahead of being silver sponsors at the upcoming Quantum.Tech conference in Washington D.C., Paul discussed the role Photonics play within the quantum ecosystem and their partnership with Microsoft.

Cybersecurity, a key buzzword in 2024 in the world of quantum. But exactly how important is quantum's impact on cyber-security? In this exclusive interview with Michael Cubeddu, the Co-Founder and VP of R&D of Aliro Quantum, we explore what companies need to understand about Quantum Secure Communication and why quantum’s impact on cybersecurity is more than a hype.

I’m a Professor of Quantum Physics and Quantum Technology and have built Q-CTRL as a world leader in quantum infrastructure software. We’re focused on making quantum technology useful through our expertise in quantum control engineering.

The excitement is building as the clocks tick closer and closer to April 24 kickstarting three action packed days of discussions, presentations and networking at Quantum.Tech USA. Ahead of speaking at the showcase in Washington D.C., we sat down with Celia Merzbacher, Executive Director at QED-C about her role within QED-C, what QED-C stands for, when most importantly, when quantum can expect to have it’s chat gpt moment.

On Thursday 7th March, Laurence Coldicott, Senior Content Director at Quantum.Tech had the pleasure of hosting and moderating a webinar focused around on ‘Driving Female Leadership in Quantum’, where he was joined by four female leaders in quantum including:

Quantum.Tech USA 2023 brought together the entire quantum ecosystem at Marriott Copley Place to benchmark, discuss and debate the current state of play in the industry and looking forward to the future of quantum. The industry came together across three action packed days in the beating heart of Boston to network and discuss their quantum strategies for 2023 and the years ahead.

The event also provided the ideal opportunity for innovative market leaders in Quantum to position themselves as the leaders of the industry and showcase their work in front of 360+ decision makers from the United State’s top government figures, financial giants, and major corporates. Over the three days, we welcomed over 100 speakers, 34 sponsors and held interactive roundtables with the leading Platform and Processor tech companies.

I Co-Founded Zapata Computing in 2017 and currently serve as the company’s CEO. My main role today is shaping and overseeing the execution of our business strategy -- which is to deliver value today using quantum algorithms with GPUs, other advanced compute, and eventually quantum hardware when it is available and capable.

I am the VP of Product at SandboxAQ, a company that spun out of Alphabet to tackle big challenges using quantum and AI. I am responsible for managing product development across all our product divisions, which currently include quantum sensing, simulation, and security. I am an engineer by training, but my career has focused on commercialization of emerging technologies and bringing new products to market. I was previously Head of Product at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing.

I am an ecosystem partner at Switzerland Innovation Park Innovaare (SIP Innovaare), Switzerland’s top Deep-Tech Innovation Hub, located at the campus of Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), with globally leading centers of excellence in Integrated Photonics, Quantum Technologies, Life Science, Advanced Manufacturing and Semiconductor Technologies. My role is two-fold: help building the ecosystem, as well as identifying global organizations that can benefit from being a part of SIP Innovaare ecosystem.

As IonQ’s Chief Revenue Officer, I’m responsible for our Go-To-Market strategy and execution. Our goal is to enable customers and partners to address their most difficult challenges by leveraging our full stack quantum computing platform. At this stage of the business, we’re focused on collaborating with early adopters interested in leveraging quantum to gain a competitive advantage.

Sam Johnson is Innovation Lead for Quantum Technologies at Innovate UK, part of UK Research an Innovation. Since 2019, he has been delivering the Commercialising Quantum Technologies Challenge Fund, a £170M strategic innovation programme supporting industry-led projects aimed at building the UK’s industrial leadership in quantum technologies. He has previously held roles in Government and academia with 7 years’ experience in quantum computing and networking research.

I’m Dr. Stephanie Simmons, the founder and Chief Quantum Officer of Photonic Inc. I drive the technical vision at Photonic, and manage the technical team building our fault-tolerant quantum computing and quantum networking products based on photonically-linked silicon spin qubits.

I am also the co-chair of the advisory board to Canada’s National Quantum Strategy, a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Silicon Quantum Technologies, a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Fellow in Quantum Information Science, and an Associate Professor at the Department of Physics at Simon Fraser University (SFU) based in Metro Vancouver.

I’m the Head of Product at Q-CTRL, a scale up company that makes quantum technology useful through intuitive and scalable infrastructure software products for quantum control solutions.

My responsibilities include productizing the technical capabilities and user experience for Q-CTRL’s technology that unlocks the potential for our customers to solve complex, meaningful challenges, from new drug discovery to logistics optimization to climate change mitigation, using real quantum devices.

As an organization leader responsible for the Product Management team and accountable to other functions, I aspire to bring teams together to deliver better outcomes (my favorite definition of a leader from Julie Zhuo).

With her panel appearance at Quantum.Tech Boston at Marriott Copley Place just around the corner, we caught up with Dr Celia Merzbacher, Executive Director at Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C).

Her essential role involves building a trusted consortium of stakeholders from across the quantum community to enable and grow the quantum industry. As such, she is uniquely positioned to provide valuable insights into the quantum industry of both today and tomorrow.

Jim Ricotta, an expert in quantum computing and CEO of a Boston-based quantum tech company, shares his insights on the latest advancements in quantum computing and how they are shaping the future of technology in a new blog post. In this post, Jim will discuss the latest developments in quantum computing, key challenges, cyber-security, trends in quantum computing and more.

Kimberly D. McGuire is the Chief Operations Officer for Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA), who joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2021 to spearhead operations and management of the center. Her broad knowledge spans across contracting and procurement, communications, change management, administration, risk mitigation, strategic planning, and workforce development. 

Noel Goddard is an expert in quantum communication technologies and has been leading the development of cutting-edge quantum communication technologies at Qunnect. In this blog, she will discuss the latest advancements in quantum communication and how they are transforming the industry. We will explore new protocols that have been introduced, their applications, and how they will impact the future of communication.

We sat down with Sergio Gago, the Managing Director of Quantum Computing at Moody's, to discuss the application of quantum computing in the financial services industry. This fascinating chat covered industry hype, the politicisation of quantum, and where Gago sees the industry in the next five years.

Rob Hays is CEO of Atom Computing, a company that builds quantum computing platforms using atomic arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms. Atom Computing is laser focused on scaling its quantum technologies to large numbers of high-quality qubits.

Rob Hays is CEO of Atom Computing, a company that builds quantum computing platforms using atomic arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms. Atom Computing is laser focused on scaling its quantum technologies to large numbers of high-quality qubits.

We sat down with Sergio Gago, the Managing Director of Quantum Computing at Moody's, to discuss the application of quantum computing in the financial services industry. This fascinating chat covered industry hype, the politicisation of quantum, and where Gago sees the industry in the next five years.

International Women's Day is here. It's a time to celebrate and recognise the enormous and often underrated contribution that women have made to social, cultural, economic, and political life worldwide. While the day is a fantastic opportunity to acknowledge the hard-won battles and progress that women have made, it's also an opportunity to reflect on the work ahead.

André M. König is the CEO of Global Quantum Intelligence, a leading provider of data, analytics, intelligence, and insights in the quantum sector. With 25 years of experience in the tech and startup world and a Quantum Tech newsletter with 17k subscribers, this published author, public speaker, and entrepreneur certainly knows his stuff.

I serve as the Global Lead for Quantum Computing at Deloitte. In that role, I am responsible for coordinating efforts to explore the applications of quantum computers and quantum technologies, coordinating with vendor partner organizations, demystifying the topic of quantum computers to business and technology executives and overseeing Deloitte’s overall strategy and investments in the quantum space.

We caught up with Dr Nikolaj Moll, Quantum Computing Scientist at Boehringer Ingelheim, to discuss the impact that quantum computing will have in the pharmaceutical and life science sectors, the current state of the industry, and what lies over the horizon in this exciting space.

Quant investing has had a good year. Trend-following hedge funds, which use mathematical models to try to predict market movements, have flourished in 2022.

We welcomed back the quantum community live in-person for the first time in over three years in Boston. With over 300+ attendees, we’re please to say the event was a huge success and provided the platform for the quantum community to learn, network and enjoy this conference. To catch the highlights, we asked the moderators for their highlights from Quantum.Tech Boston.

What are the major enterprises doing to drive forward quantum adoption and innovation? This was one of the key topics covered in Quantum.Tech London 2021.

As one of the leading sponsors at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022, we caught up with Elliot MacGowan, COO at Agnostiq who explored Agnostiq as a business and what they do, what motivated Agnostiq to build Covalent and what they are looking forward to for Quantum.Tech Boston.

Ahead of Quantum.Tech Boston, we caught up with Murray Thom, vice president of product management at D-Wave who are one of Quamtum.Tech's leading sponsors. We found out how D-wave is working with the global developer community, what advice Murray would give to any CTO/CIO looking at quantum technologies for the first time and explained the overview of their On-Board to Quantum Computing Service

Marco Pistoia, Managing Director, Distinguished Engineer, Head of Research and Engineering, Head of Quantum Technology, JP Morgan Chase & Co discusses what JP Morgan are doing to drive forward quantum innovation.

Deloitte are one of the leading sponsors at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022. Ahead of the fantastic event in June 2022, we caught up with Scott Buchholz, Emerging Technology Research Managing Director, and Government and Public Services Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP, to discuss his thoughts on quantum as a service, the real-world applications being Deloitte technologies have seen and what they are looking forward to at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022!

Watch the panel discussion from Quantum.Tech Virtual in September 2021 looking at answering How are major enterprises driving quantum adoption and innovation?

Atom Computing are one of the leading sponsors at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022. Ahead of the fantastic event in June 2022, we caught up with Rob Hays, CEO of Atom Computing, to discuss their predictions for quantum technology in 2022, what Atom Computing do and what they are looking forward to the most at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022.

Cryptographic algorithms are what keep your quantum tech data yours. If a weakness were discovered in the encryption algorithm, your intellectual property and any data or information secured by the affected algorithm would be in danger of exposure.

Zapata is one of the founding sponsors at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022. Ahead of the fantastic event in June 2022, we caught up Katherine Londergan, Chief Marketing Officer at Zapata to explore where they are in the quantum landscape, the work Zapata are doing behind the scenes on the route to achieving Quantum supremacy and how their quantum solutions help the end user.

Rewind to September 221 and relive the thoughts, opinions and ideas of the quantum experts looking at answering 'what are the long term opportunities for enterprises utilizing cryptography & communications?'

This talk from September 2021, we discussed a case study in which we defend against this threat, using virtual private networks (VPNs) combined with quantum-safe algorithms and key generation methods with Nick Van Duyn, Senior Solutions Architect – Cybersecurity, Cambridge Quantum.

Zapata Computing is one of the founding sponsors at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022. Ahead of the fantastic event in June 2022, we caught up Katherine Londergan, Chief Marketing Officer at Zapata, to discuss their place in the quantum landscape, their work behind the scenes in both science and engineering to help customers prepare for quantum and how their quantum solutions help the end user.

Ahead of sponsoring Quantum.Tech Boston in June, we caught up with Scott Buchholz, Emerging Technology Research Managing Director, and Government and Public Services Chief Technology Officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP to find out and discuss the the Quantum market, what Deloitte are currently working towards and why they are looking forward to sponsoring Quantum.Tech Boston.

Take Boehringer Ingelheim’s quantum team. Many teams and companies were forced by Covid to make radical adjustments, and many collapsed under the strain. Elica’s team was founded during the pandemic. There was no office: the team of five were recruited and worked from around the world. When the team met face-to-face, they had already been working together for over a year.

The panel discussion from Quantum.Tech London 2021 looks at how we can overcome the problem identification, algorithm development and deployment challenges of harnessing the power of qubits?

Watch this fantastic panel discussion from Quantum.Tech London September 2021 as Quantum leaders from the likes of Novo Nordisk, Merck, United Health Group and Quantum Strategy Institute to explore the role Quantum innovation is playing in the healthcare and life sciences industries.

Quantropi is one of the leading sponsors at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022. We caught up with James Nguyen, Co-Founder and CEO at Quantropi, to get his thoughts on Y2Q, the quantum landscape and its impact on cybersecurity for enterprises, and what he's looking forward to at Quantum.Tech Boston.

Highlighted purple is every calendar, 8th March 2022 represents International Womens Day! Araceli Venegas-Gomez, Founder and CEO at Qureca Computing explored her Quantum journey with Qureca and the role she plays within Qureca and the industry.

Highlighted purple is every calendar, 8th March 2022 represents International Women's Day! Katherine Londergan, Chief Marketing Officer at Zapata Computing explored her Quantum journey with Zapata Computing and the role she plays in the company and the industry.

Highlighted purple is every calendar, 8th March 2022 represents International Women's Day! Next one back – Victoria Lipinska, Quantum Lead, KPN explored her Quantum journey and the role she plays within KPN and the industry.

Highlighted purple is every calendar, 8th March 2022 represents International Women's Day! Jennifer Houston, Chief Marketing Officer at D-Wave explored her Quantum journey and the role she plays within D-Wave and the industry.

Highlighted purple in every calendar, 8th March 2022 represents International Women's Day! Manjari Chadran-Ramesh, Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners explored her Quantum journey and the role she plays within company and the industry.

Highlighted purple is every calendar, 8th March 2022 represents International Womens Day! Elica Kyoseva Quantum Computing Scientist Boehringer Ingelheim explored her Quantum journey and the role she plays within Boehringer Ingelheim and the industry.

Quantum computing is widely expected to be a fundamental game changer for data centers in the 21st century. Seemingly intractable computation problems appear to occur on a daily basis. Issues with optimization are frequently cited, for instance, whether it be in logistics or manufacturing processes, the broad area of simulations of physical systems or even in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Such tasks can be overwhelming for classical computers, regardless of the amount of silicon chips that have been built in. Quantum computing holds the prospect of being the solution to many of these problems through the implementation of new kinds of algorithms - hybrid quantum algorithms.

Watch the panel discussion from Quantum.Tech London September 2021 as Doug Finke, Managing Editor, Quantum Computing Report is joined by: Dustin Moody, Mathematician, Cryptographic Technology Group, NIST Denis Mandich, CTO, Qrypt as they discuss and explore what the long term opportunities for enterprises are in utilizing cryptography and communications.

Watch Denis Mandich, CTO at Qrypt as he discusses and talks us through the Quantum Security across an Adversarial Internet in this keynote session from Quantum.Tech London in September.

“One of the advantages you have in, let's say, the UK banking system,” he continues, “is there are tens of millions of bank accounts [operating] on a daily basis. There are hundreds of millions - or even billions - of individual transactions between all of those accounts. So you can, to a certain extent, conduct your business safe in the knowledge that there's so much other financial activity going around you that your individual transaction won't stand out among the noise.”

Dive deeper into where we are in the Quantum landscape, how we are advancing Quantum Technologies and what roles companies are playing in aiding this advancement.

What is the fastest path to Quantum Sampling? This panel discussion explores Practical Quantum Advantage in the Near Term: Enhancing ML workflows in enterprise. 

It’s hard to get away from a kind of scientific romanticism, as Williams describes the early days of quantum at NIST. For years, quantum computing has been almost defined by the roadmap: ‘We will have this many qubits by this date,’ says the spokesperson, pointing at the slide, ‘and the following Thursday is when we’ll cure all diseases and build an electric car that drives forever’.

This panel video dives into the discussion of Beyond Enterprise Adoption to Quantum Acceleration. Watch speakers from IBM, Boeing, Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co as they answer How can you drive Quantum expertise within your company?

The panel discussion looks at the different approaches to getting started on your Quantum Journey.

This is Sutor’s niche. Going back pre-pandemic, there are YouTube videos, audio streams and text interviews where he hits the same beats without ever losing momentum. Answers aren’t repeated or regurgitated: even when you have an idea of the answer that’s coming, the delivery is like an enthused university professor retreading old ground for a new year of undergrads.

How do you transform diamond into an elegant solution and what methods are currently underway to make this possible? Andy carries over 15 years of experience of diamond defect physics and explores the work which Element Six have been doing over the past few year in turning diamond into an engineered solution.

Denis Moody Mathematician, Cryptographic Technology Group at NIST, Denis Mandich, CTO at Qrypt discuss the opportunities available to enterprises to utilising cryptography and communications. The panel is moderated by Doug Finke, Managing Editor of Quantum Computing Report.

Join Quantum industry leaders in this panel including: Christopher Savoie, Founder and CEO at Zapata Computing Sonika Johri, Senior Quantum Applications Researcher at IonQ Eric Reuthe, Vice President, Engineering at Zapata Computing as they discuss the latest trends in Quantum Technology and the fastest path to commercialization.

Join host, Dr Joseph Broz, Director at IBM who is joined by Darren Brock, Principal Research Engineer, Space at Lockheed Martin and Zak Dutton, Lead Scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies as they present their presentations on Quantum Computing Applications in the Aerospace and Defense area.

Our expert speakers answer your questions from the September edition of Quantum.Tech's Quantum Thursdays. Take a look at their answers here:

A key stage in the commercial development of quantum computers has been reached with the successful UK trial of a high-performance, universal operating system.

Dominic Widdows, Senior Principal NLP Scientist at LivePerson, answers your questions from the first edition of Quantum.Tech's Quantum Thursdays, July 30.

Join Dimitri van Esch, Project Manager at ABN Amro, at Quantum.Tech in London this April. Here he explains what technology infrastructure building blocks are required to begin a Quantum computing or secure communications proof of concept.

Advisory Board member Florian Neukart, Director, Advanced Technologies and IT Innovation at Volkswagen Group of America, gives his top tips on the adoption of Quantum technology and its future.

Patrick Gilday is an Investor at Global Founders Capital - Read his take on the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2020.

Mohammad Choucair, CEO of Archer Materials, talks to us about the company's biggest focus for the next 12 months and what he's most looking forward to at Quantum.Tech.

Dustin Moody, Mathematician, Cryptographic Technology Group at NIST gives us his take on the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2020 and the goal of post-quantum cryptography.

Jan Goetz, CEO & Founder of IQM gives his insight into the future of Quantum technology and advice on how an enterprise can start their Quantum journey.

How does a team of quantum researchers make the jump from academia to industry? In the case of HQS and its CEO and co-founder, Michael Marthaler, it began with a round of cold calls - ringing up companies and asking, if, on off chance, they’d be interested in doing some quantum simulation.

Be a part of Boston Consulting Group's upcoming publication State of Quantum Computing. Get involved by filling a short survey to help aggregate trends to give a clearer picture of where the field is heading, what can really be expected and in which time frame.

It’s not an unfamiliar story: a small team of academics working in something quantum-related spinning out from their university to capitalise on their combined knowledge. Rahko, however, isn’t the culmination of decades of researching, lecturing and professorships in academia.

Something refreshing about the quantum computing industry is its diversity of backgrounds. CEOs, investors and senior programmers and engineers commonly migrate - or seem to fall into - quantum from other fields, pulled to QC companies by their promise, novelty or the need to be at what they see as technology’s bleeding edge.

Discover how quantum computing works and delve into the math behind it with Robert S. Sutor's latest publication, Dancing with Qubits: How quantum computing works and how it can change the world.

A scanner that shows whole brain activity in greater detail than previously possible - with four times the sensitivity and far higher resolution - is ready for commercial development following trials.

Dr. Philipp Gerbert, Senior Partner and Managing Director at Boston Consulting Group shares his thoughts on the first edition of Quantum.Tech which took place September 10-11, 2019 in Boston. 

“Quantum technology will be as transformational in the 21st Century as harnessing electricity was in the 19th,” says Professor Michael Biercuk, founder and CEO of Sydney-based quantum control company, Q-CTRL, in the company’s introductory homepage video. It’s by no means a controversial statement given the potential power of the technology. 

What did it take to wake the world up to cybersecurity in the 21st Century? The warnings were there from the start: how long ago did you first hear a guest ‘technology expert’ on television warning the audience about choosing strong passwords? Since the dawn of the internet, there has been a steady trickle of online horror story headlines: credit card fraud, identity theft, online blackmail and cyberstalking. 

Aaron Bishop, CEO, of the Quantum Security Alliance tells us what he thinks some of the biggest challenges facing the Quantum landscape are, as well as what technology infrastructure building blocks are required to begin a Quantum computing or secure communications proof of concept. 

Dr. Fred Moxley, Research Fellow at Dartmouth College explain what the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in 2019/2020 is, as well as what he's most looking forward to at the upcoming Quantum.Tech event taking place in Boston, this September.

Marcos Allende Lopez, Technology Coordinator at LACChain discusses the Quantum landscape and gives his advice on how to start your Quantum journey. 

Dr. George Tuckwell, Divisional Director, Geoscience and Engineering at RSK answers our questions on the future of Quantum technology and the challenges facing its adoption.

Finland-based startup secures EUR 11.45M in seed funding from international investors. ESPOO, Finland, July 9, 2019 – With a vision to drive disruptive advancements in quantum computing, a team of innovators has launched IQM Finland Oy (IQM). The startup—a spinout from Aalto University (Aalto) and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT)—is developing hardware systems to enable the world’s first scalable quantum computing solution. 

Join Stephanie Long and Geoff Woollacott as they dig into key findings from TBR’s new Quantum Computing Market Landscape taking place July 24, 2019 at 1 p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT. 

Listening to him talk, Thomas Monz from the University of Innsbruck could be talking about any co-working space in the world. At the Austrian Academy of Sciences, he describes researchers milling around a giant coffee table, sitting down with contemporaries from different fields, sparking ideas off each other and trading insights. When he mentions the number of Nobel Laureates who would sit round that table, it sounds almost like an afterthought. When I press him for names, he haltingly compiles a list of names on the fly.

In a TED talk at UCLA in 2016, Alireza Shabani tells a story about falling in love with physics. At the age of ten, his sister found him reading a story book. Unimpressed, she told him that it was time to start reading about science instead, and dragged him to a bookshop where she bought him a weighty tome about atoms. This went down better than you might expect, and a lifelong fascination with physics was born. 

Dr. Merrick Watchorn, Chair at Quantum Security Alliance, gives his insight into the future of Quantum technology and the impact it will have on his industry.

Dr. Isaac Balbin, Founder & CEO of Parsl, explains his views on the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in the upcoming year and what he's looking forward to at the Quantum.Tech conference, taking place in Boston, September 10-11, 2019.

Dr. Tuhin Sahai, Technical Fellow at United Technologies Research Center answers our questions on the biggest challenges facing the adoption of Quantum technology in the year ahead.

Dr. Scott Genin, Head of Materials Discovery at OTI Lumionics gives his advice on how an enterprise can start their Quantum journey.

Dimitri van Esch, Project Manager at ABN Amro gives his tips on how to best engage and support your business to adopt Quantum technologies and how to start your Quantum journey.

Oliver Wick, Technology Scouting, Lead Quantum Computing at BMW Research, Technology and Innovation answers our questions on the biggest challenges facing Quantum technology and where BMW's focus is within Quantum in the near future.

Dr. Tommaso Calarco, Director / Coordinator at the Peter Grunberg Institute, FZ-Julich & Quantum Support Action Group at EU Quantum Flagship talks to us about the future of Quantum technology and what he's looking forward to at the upcoming Quantum.Tech event taking place this September in Boston.

In the quest to accurately simulate the behavior of chemical entities, quantum computers are expected to offer a significant advantage over their classical counterparts. But to that end, algorithms and the hardware architectures themselves need to be tailored to the specific task at hand. In a collaboration with a co-author affiliated with both Forschungszentrum Juelich and RWTH Aachen University, our team at IBM Research-Zurich now lays out how exchange-type two-qubit gates constitute a very promising avenue to calculate molecular properties.

Around three minutes before I’m scheduled to talk to Dr. Federico Carminati, chief innovation officer at CERN openlab, I run into a problem. Re-reading his profile on the CERN openlab website, I’ve missed a critical detail. Dr. Carminati is not just exploring novel ways to increase CERN’s computing power through Quantum computing and machine learning. He is also a psychoanalyst, with a certification in something called ‘pet-assisted therapy’. I have never heard of pet-assisted therapy.

Ever wondered how to make something cooler than anything else in the known universe?

That’s the question that greets visitors to the website of Finnish cryogenics company, Bluefors. Their answer: take that something and place it inside one of the company’s dilution refrigerators. Once active, the central compartment of the fridge will chill anything inside to (a fraction of one degree Kelvin above) absolute zero. Absolute zero - the lowest possible energy state for matter; the coldest it is possible to get - would (theoretically) be achieved at -273.15 degrees Celsius. Bluefors’ dilution refrigerators will get you to below 0.01 degrees Celsius of that.

The quantum computing effort at Honeywell appears to be heating up. Over the last several months, the company has announced a series of new developments in its trapped ion quantum computer research. Until recently, the tech giant had been rather tight-lipped about its plans in this area.

How established must an industry be to become a target for disruption? Not established at all according to William Hurley, known amongst friends and colleagues as “whurley,” a serial entrepreneur and founder of the disruptive quantum computing firm Strangeworks. 

With over 100 years of measurement innovation, and over 100 people dedicated to quantum technology, the UK’s National Physical Laboratory is a world leader in innovative science. But there’s a twist. Although there is plenty of scientific research taking place - at a level equivalent to any leading research institute - the NPL’s primary goal is to support British industry. As such, the Quantum Metrology Institute, the organization within the NPL responsible for quantum technologies, is at the cutting edge of developing deployment-ready quantum tools & techniques.

University of Copenhagen physicists, as part of the University and Microsoft collaboration focused on topological quantum computing, may have unloosed a Gordian knot in quantum computer development. 

This “Digital Military Magazine” discusses what it sees as China’s goal of achieving cyberspace dominion. In 2017, Beijing started quantum Internet experiments with a network of satellites and computers that could share information worldwide at an unprecedented high speed.

IBM today announced the expansion of the IBM Q Network to include a number of global universities with the intent to partner with IBM to accelerate joint research in quantum computing, and develop curricula to help prepare students for careers that will be influenced by this next era of computing, across science and business.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Maryland, have developed a new device for controlling and measuring qubits inside the low-temperature environment of quantum computers; the new device can be manipulated at lower frequency, without the need for microwave lines, thus reducing cost and complexity.

Scaling up quantum circuitry is a significant challenge. Building up even a relatively small system raises the problems of noise and interference, increases error rates, and can eventually jeopardise output completely. But for young start-ups, quantum computing has a second scalability problem: attracting more talent to a field still widely perceived by those on the outside as intimidating, inaccessible and academic. Oxford Quantum Circuits, a spin-out from the University of Oxford, has a solution for the first. CEO Ilana Wisby, Founder, Peter Leek and quantum engineer Brian Vlastakis are working on the second.

The Microsoft Quantum Network made its official debut this week at Microsoft’s Redmond campus; representatives laid out the company’s vision for quantum computing and introduced network partners to Microsoft’s tools of the quantum trade at the event.

How does a 300 year old institution do innovation? That’s the challenge that John Stewart, Global Head of Scouting and Research at NatWest grapples with each day. 

If you had invented the Natural Language engine behind Apple’s Siri you might be inclined to rest on your laurels. Not so for machine learning expert Christopher Savoie, CEO and Co-Founder of Zapata Computing. After running data and analytics for Nissan, Christopher launched a photonics company using machine learning capabilities emanating from Alan Aspuru-Guzik’s group at Harvard. Based on that experience, in 2017 Chris and Alan decided to spin out Alan’s quantum information group into what is now Zapata. 

The race is on to quantum computing. Some of the technology industry’s biggest companies, such as IBM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and China’s Alibaba, along with upstarts like California-based Rigetti, are in a race to build  cutting-edge quantum computing machines, which promise to revolutionize industries including energy, health, and finance by letting them crunch data faster than ever before. Governments understand the geopolitical implications too. China is building a $10 billion national lab for quantum computing.

Scientists are working on accelerator-based techniques for developing new materials that could speed up development of quantum technologies. A coordinated research project funded by the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) has brought together leading scientists from Australia, China, Croatia, Finland, Italy, India, Israel, Singapore, Spain and the USA. The main aim of the project is to develop novel, accelerator-based ion beam techniques for creating and characterizing modified material required for new quantum technologies.

An explanation of the need for both fiber and satellites for quantum communications to be scaled globally.  Both can transmit qubits, but for now in the world of the “Quantum Internet”, fiber and satellites serve two different markets and represent two different opportunities.  Read more in the in-depth, information-dense companion blog to your ITQ newsletter.

At first glance, Matt Johnson’s journey to CEO of QC Ware--the Palo Alto company developing accessible, hardware-agnostic quantum computing software--immediately stands out from the mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists you’d expect to find running a quantum computing company. With an impressive list of Fortune 100 customers, investment from Citigroup, Airbus and Goldman Sachs, and partnerships with NASA and the US National Science Foundation, the company has already established itself as a leader in this emerging field. 

The ubiquity of errors in the quantum computing community is an open secret. And yet, for those on the outside, the word ‘computing’ can imply reliability. It’s a simple enough mistake to make for non-experts, who, not unreasonably, conflate quantum computing with its everyday, classical forebear - where technology has progressed to the point where errors at the hardware level are so rare as to be practically inconsequential. We implicitly trust classical computers to perform calculations faultlessly - but in quantum computing, errors are rife.

Xanadu’s Nathan Killoran accepts the scale of the company’s vision: in two years, this two-year-old company of around 35 software and hardware engineers is dedicated to building a scalable photonic quantum computer with accompanying software.

Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have launched a new Quantum Fundamentals, ARchitecture and Machines (Q-FARM) initiative to leverage and expand the university’s strengths in quantum science and engineering and to train the field’s next generation of scientists.

Scientists are building computers that use entangled quantum bits (called, “qubits”) to complete calculations that were once thought impossible and at speeds never imagined.

Field tests are solving the challenges of counting photons and measuring their quantum states in quantum key distribution (QKD)-based optical transmission networks to ensure communications security.

Archer Exploration Limited’s Dr Mohammad Choucair, has invented the first material known to overcome a known quantum technology limitation by allowing quantum information (quibits) to be processed at room temperatures. Archer is now developing the licensed University of Sydney (USyd) technology which can hold quantum information and allow it to process the quibits at ordinary room temperatures.

The ability to track and control quantum processors in real time is a difficult task, according to Finland’s Aalto University researchers Antti Vepsäläinen, Sergey Danilin, and Sorin Paraoanu. The group of researchers recently described their latest work in approaching the quantum computing speed limit with accuracy.

Microsoft shared in late 2018 that they are expanding collaborations to include startups that are driving the quantum industry forward. Microsoft had previously been collaborating with organizations such as Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA), and Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL), and strategic research partnerships with institutions including Purdue University, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Copenhagen, TU Delft, and the University of Sydney.

The smart office in downtown San Francisco could be home to a cool ecommerce or tech start-up. Scribbled quadratic equations on a whiteboard, open-plan, and a cute dachshund trotting around, not what you would typically associate with an 81 year old manufacturing giant. But for the past 2 and a half years, this has been the home of Florian Neukart, the Principal Scientist at Volkswagen Group of America, the German automotive leader. 

Singapore may not be the first location that comes to mind when identifying quantum technology innovation hubs, but world-class infrastructure, a great scientific knowledge base and plenty of government support has attracted many leading quantum physicists to the steamy island metropolis.

Among them are Tommaso Demarie and Ewan Munro, co-founders of pioneering quantum computing start-up Entropica Labs, who met at Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies. With support, and pre-seed investment from London-based accelerator Entrepreneur First, Tommaso and Ewan have their sights set on transforming computational biology.

You may know Southwark in South London by its magnificent Gothic cathedral. Or by browsing through bustling Borough Market. Or even Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. But there are a couple of guys determined to make Southwark famous for some serious quantum science.

Shahram Mossayebi and Patrick Camilleri are the co-founders of 2-year-old start-up Crypto Quantique. They are developing a solution to address the biggest challenge facing the booming Internet of Things (IoT) market: security.  Quantum tech caught up with the two entrepreneurs at their offices in Southwark.

Rivada Networks has joined with 17 other members of the Quantum Alliance Initiative to submit the first global Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) recommendations to the International Telecommunications Union—Telecommunication Standardization Section (ITU-T) meeting in Geneva, scheduled for January 22-30, 2019.

A study by the Quantum Technologies for Information Science (QUTIS) group of the University of the Basque Country’s Department of Physical Chemistry, has produced a series of protocols for quantum sensors that could allow images to be obtained by means of the nuclear magnetic resonance of single biomolecules using a minimal amount of radiation.

Airbus has announced that it is creating a global competition to encourage developers to find ways quantum computing can be applied to aircraft design. Airbus is already exploring the use of quantum computing in areas such as “route optimization and satellite imagery.”

Quantum computing (QC) for smart cities may be the best business use of QC technology according to this INSEAD blog posting. The author says quantum computing is best suited for cases that involve massive data processing, but don’t require 100 percent precision in computations. Future smart cities represent a context in which those kind of problems will abound.