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