Announcements of 2025 Nobel Prize winners start tomorrow. With announcements for Nobel Prize for Physics scheduled for Tuesday 7 October. Every autumn I indulge in a guilty pleasure: browsing speculative lists of Nobel Prize contenders and trying to guess who might pick up the world’s most coveted science prize. Part of the fun is that ...

I never write about current politics. This might be my first on this blog. In fact, for the sake of my own sanity, I’ve made a point of steering this blog and most of my day clear of politics and the daily chaos of partisan news. I prefer to focus on science and quantum tech ...

Cisco took on an ambitious full-stack strategy to make distributed quantum computing a reality sooner than many expect. Instead of waiting for a single perfect quantum processor with millions of qubits, Cisco is building the hardware, software, and architecture needed to network today’s smaller quantum machines into unified quantum data centers. This approach mirrors how ...

Preparing a large telecom (or any enterprise) for the post-quantum cryptography era is a massive, multi-faceted undertaking, but it is achievable with foresight, resources, and commitment. We’ve seen that it involves much more than just installing new algorithms - it’s about transforming an organization’s approach to cryptography across potentially thousands of applications and devices, under ...

Whether you personally believe Q-Day will come in 5 years or 50, the world around you isn’t taking chances - and neither can you. As a CISO, you’re now being implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) told by every corner of your ecosystem that quantum preparedness is mandatory. Regulators demand it via hard deadlines. Key clients and ...

Don’t mistake the noise of cynicism for the signal of intelligence. If someone validates themselves as a useless cynic - unwilling to provide anything beyond scoffs and derision - don’t waste your energy getting dragged into their performative pessimism. Instead, direct your attention to the genuine skeptics and curious contrarians who challenge ideas in good faith ...

In my opinion, forward-thinking organizations should consider creating a Chief Quantum Officer (CQO) role. Much like those historical electricity executives, a CQO would spearhead the adoption of a disruptive technology that is revolutionary, promising - but widely misunderstood. It’s a provocative idea (even “a job title from Star Trek,” as one commentator quipped ), but ...

Magic states are special quantum states that enable the universal operations needed for any quantum algorithm, yet which are not themselves easy to produce or protect. In essence, magic states supply the "extra quantum sauce" that elevates a protected quantum computer from what could be emulated on a classical computer to a machine that can ...

Thesis: Migration time to safer cryptography is inversely proportional to an organization’s crypto-agility. Formally: Let A denote an organization’s crypto-agility (0 ≤ A ≤ 1) and Y the wall-clock time required to replace a cryptographic primitive across all in-scope systems. Then Y ≈ K ⁄ A for some complexity constant K. As A → 0, ...

For three decades, Q-Day has been “just a few years away.” I want to show you how to make your own informed prediction on when Q-Day will arrive. Counting physical qubits by itself is misleading. To break RSA you need error‑corrected logical qubits, long and reliable operation depth, and enough throughput to finish within an ...

I will try and compare my proposed CRQC Readiness Benchmark with QTT, highlighting fundamental differences in methodology, assumptions, and philosophy, all in an effort to clarify how each approach informs our understanding of the looming “Q-Day.” The goal is to articulate why my benchmark and QTT produce different outlooks (2030s vs. 2050s for RSA-2048), and ...

The trouble with quantum computing predictions so far has been that too many have been more speculation than science, more influenced by bias than by balanced analysis. We have the tools and knowledge to do better. By embracing a data-driven, scenario-based approach, we can turn timeline forecasting from a source of confusion into a valuable ...

The Quantum Threat Tracker (QTT) is a newly released open-source tool by Cambridge Consultants and the University of Edinburgh that aims to forecast when quantum computers will break today’s encryption. It combines quantum resource estimation (using optimized variants of Shor’s algorithm) with hardware development roadmaps to predict when cryptographic protocols will be broken. In other ...

To the untrained eye, espionage against scientists can be nearly invisible - it blends into everyday academic or business activity. But certain red flags and tactics surface again and again. Below is a consolidated list of common espionage methods (many from my own firsthand cases) used to target quantum tech researchers and organizations: ...

Quantum sensing technologies are emerging as powerful tools to detect and track UASs, including small and nano-drones that often evade conventional sensors. These quantum sensors, such as quantum radars, quantum LiDARs, atomic magnetometers, and Rydberg RF detectors, exploit phenomena like entanglement, squeezing, and extreme sensitivity of quantum states to reveal faint drone signatures beyond classical ...

From a CISO and business leadership perspective, the ask is clear: we need to secure budget and resources now to begin the multi-year journey of quantum-proofing our organization. This includes funding for risk assessments, cryptographic inventory tools, new encryption software/hardware, staff training or hiring, and pilot projects to start integrating PQC. The investment is justified ...

AI is reshaping businesses across industries, and corporate boards are increasingly expected to oversee AI strategy, ethics, and risk management. In fact, the number of S&P 500 companies formally assigning AI oversight to a board committee more than tripled in 2025, and nearly half of Fortune 100 companies now highlight AI expertise in their directors’ ...

Given the practical challenges, organizations may need to begin their quantum-readiness journey with a risk-driven approach rather than a theoretically perfect one. The essence of this strategy is to focus limited resources where they matter most – addressing the highest quantum-vulnerability risks first and implementing interim safeguards for the rest. Even the U.S. government’s guidance ...

Quantum Art is an Israeli quantum computing startup (spun out of the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2022) focused on developing scalable trapped-ion hardware for quantum computers. The company was born out of decades of ion-trap research at Weizmann and the achievement of Israel’s first full-stack quantum computer by its founding team. Led by a ...

Boards do not need to dive into the scientific intricacies of qubits and algorithms, but they do need to recognize that this is a strategically important risk – one that can’t be simply delegated away. It requires the same level of governance attention as other enterprise-level risks like financial compliance, geopolitical factors, or pandemic preparedness ...

Quantum Brilliance (QB) is an Australian-German quantum computing company (founded in 2019 as a spin-out of Australian National University) developing diamond-based quantum accelerators that operate at room temperature. Their hardware uses nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in synthetic diamond as qubits - defects in a diamond lattice where a nitrogen atom sits adjacent to a missing carbon ...

Quantum readiness is not an exercise in science fiction – it’s a very practical program that yields benefits immediately. Regulators are pushing us all in this direction, which means boards are willing to fund it. The journey forces you to finally catalog your cryptographic assets and clean up long-standing weaknesses, improving your security posture right ...

Benchmarking quantum capabilities for cryptography is both critical and challenging. We can’t rely on any single metric like qubit count to tell us how near we are to breaking RSA-2048. A combination of logical qubit count, error-corrected circuit depth, and operational speed must reach certain thresholds in unison. Existing benchmarks – Quantum Volume, Algorithmic Qubits, ...

Quantum Circuits, Inc. (QCI) is a Yale University spin-out that has pioneered a novel approach to superconducting quantum computing focused on hardware-efficient error correction. Co-founded in 2017 by leading Yale physicists (including Robert Schoelkopf, Michel Devoret, and Luigi Frunzio), QCI’s mission is to accelerate the path to fault-tolerant quantum computers by "correcting first, then scaling" ...