When Harvard’s neutral-atom team quietly dropped their new paper on a fault-tolerant architecture for universal quantum computation, a few days ago, it felt like the field had crossed an invisible line. For years we’ve had impressive pieces of the puzzle - better qubits here, a clever code there, some elegant theory everywhere – but Lukin’s ...

Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) is an Australian quantum hardware company based in Sydney, founded in May 2017 as a UNSW Sydney spin-off by Prof. Michelle Simmons (2018 Australian of the Year). It was launched as Australia’s first quantum computing company with A$83 million in seed backing from the Australian government, UNSW, Telstra, Commonwealth Bank (CBA), ...

Quantum Motion is a London-based quantum computing company pioneering a silicon-based approach to building scalable quantum computers. Founded in 2017 by UCL’s Prof. John Morton and Oxford’s Prof. Simon Benjamin, the startup spun out of those universities to harness traditional CMOS semiconductor technology for quantum processors. Unlike many competitors that rely on exotic fabrication, Quantum ...

Photonic Inc. is a Vancouver-based quantum computing startup pioneering a distributed, fault-tolerant quantum computer architecture built on silicon spin qubits that are optically linked by photons. In contrast to monolithic quantum processors, Photonic’s design treats networking as a native feature: qubit modules are entangled together via telecom-fiber links, effectively combining quantum computing and quantum communication ...

Over the years, I’ve developed a personal toolkit - a field guide - for evaluating quantum startups and their claims. The goal is to neither be swept up by the mystique nor dismiss genuine progress. This balance is crucial: the quantum field is rife with hype, now more than ever, and companies sometimes exaggerate to ...

In November 2025, Quantinuum unveiled Helios, a new 98-qubit quantum processor that pushes the frontier of quantum computing with a novel trapped-ion architecture. It also published an accompanying paper on arXiv "Helios: A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer." Helios is based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) design, meaning it physically moves ion qubits around on ...

Quantum computing promises revolutionary capabilities, but it also poses unprecedented threats to cybersecurity. Experts warn of a looming “Quantum Apocalypse” scenario - the day when a sufficiently advanced quantum computer can crack encryption like RSA or ECC, exposing sensitive data that was once considered secure. And of course, there's the already present "harvest now, decrypt ...

A global race is on to build cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) - machines powerful enough to break current encryption. Governments and industry are pouring billions into quantum R&D, and intelligence analysts scrutinize whether a geopolitical rival might secretly be ahead. Yet amid this focus on who builds a quantum codebreaker first, an alternative threat ...

Cybersecurity lore often paints Q-Day (the moment a quantum computer cracks RSA/ECC encryption) as an instant "Quantum Apocalypse" where every system gets hacked immediately. Planes falling from the sky, banks drained in seconds, an overnight digital Armageddon - if that nightmare doesn’t happen, some assume Q-Day wasn’t so bad after all. But this view misses ...

Quantum computing is no longer a far-off hypothesis - it’s a rapidly emerging reality that could render today’s encryption obsolete. For CISOs and their boards, this means a new kind of cybersecurity crisis is on the horizon. Sensitive data that is safely encrypted now may be sitting like a ticking time bomb, waiting to be ...

Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is entering the standards stage, with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently selecting the first quantum-resistant algorithms. However, the future of PQC will not be as straightforward as simply adopting NIST’s choices globally. A strong push for digital sovereignty is emerging around the world, driven by eroding trust ...

What is "Trust Now, Forge Later" (TNFL)? Most discussions about quantum computing threats focus on “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL) - the idea that adversaries can collect encrypted data today and store it, hoping a future quantum computer will break the encryption and expose sensitive information. This risk is very real, especially for data that ...

In the recent IBM's “Secure the Post-Quantum Future” report 62% of executives admitted that their organization is waiting for vendors to make them quantum‑safe. In other words, they expect cloud providers, network equipment makers and software vendors to embed post‑quantum cryptography (PQC) so that internal teams can simply apply updates. This mindset is understandable - ...

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 ...