Snake oil for sale!
Guaranteed to cure what ails your qubits!
Marin Ivezic re-shared “Quantum Snake Oil: A Field Guide to Misleading Quantum Technology Marketing” from May 5, 2026. That inspired me to re-share this week’s featured image, which long-time readers no doubt remember from March 21, 2025. He’s got me beat, though, posting the term as far back as October 4, 2001.
This week’s IQT News:
- Introducing IQT’s Quantum Finance Series
- IQT Sunday Edition
- Quantum Ready Solutions went gold!
- C12 Unveils Roadmap to Useful Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing by 2033
- Chemical and Pharmaceutical Giants Partnering with Quantum Technology Companies for Product Development
This week’s premium content:
- Better late than never, QuiX Quantum?
- Quantum Reservoir Computing
- EuroHPC JU’s MeluXina-Q
- SaxonQ is on QCI Connect
This week’s Friends of The Quantum Dragon:
- 85% of security leaders believe quantum computers will break existing standards. by Simon Pamplin, CTO of Certes
- “By targeting one entity, they’re gaining access to multiple healthcare providers and their data.” by Rebecca Moody, Head of Data Research at Comparitech
In this edition:
- Let’s see what makes atomic clocks tick…
- An Evening of Quantum Computer Music
- memQ’s got comics!
- We are the phase flip champions.
- Feeling alright? Wanna quantum.talk about it?
- “Everything else on the chip is enormous”
- I thought Diraq would make a bigger deal out of it.
- Yet Another Kind of Quantum Speedup
- Podcast #87: Your entropy isn’t random enough.
- Aurora, assemble!
- The Humpty Dumpty Qubit
- DeltaKit Community Fund
Let’s see what makes atomic clocks tick…
The U.S. National Science Foundation’s “Quantum sensing: From the inner workings of cells to the outer limits of the universe” appears to show the inside of a JILA atomic clock. If that’s indeed what it is, that’s the first of its kind I’ve seen. Images usually just show the outsides of these things.
An Evening of Quantum Computer Music
Prof. Eduardo Reck Miranda and Dr. Scott Oshiro will perform and lecture at the CCRMA Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in Stanford, CA, on Friday, August 7, from 7 PM – 9 PM.
memQ’s got comics!
Well, at least one comic strip, anyway. To make it easier to navigate the rest of the site, you can also visit the Resources page and scroll down to Articles.
We are the phase flip champions.
I just got to the lengthy Quantum Error Correction chapter in “Quantum Bits,” and not only does author Yuval Boger provide a great explanation, but he also gave me a shameless excuse to share a video of Mark Cuban trying to guess that David Armand is pantomiming “We Are the Champions.”
Feeling alright? Wanna quantum.talk about it?
It seems like almost everyone in quantum has a podcast nowadays, including yours truly with IQT’s The Quantum Dragon Podcast. Let’s see who’s gonna snatch up the domain quantum.talk as soon as word gets out that it’s available. I would get it, but a certain fire-breather won’t consider domains without “dragon” in them.
“Everything else on the chip is enormous”
This line by Dr. Michaela Eichinger is hilarious because everything on a chip is obviously tiny. But of course, relatively speaking, some components are tinier than others. Overall, this “size tour of a superconducting quantum chip” is a great, high-level Celebrity Homes Tour of its components.
I thought Diraq would make a bigger deal out of it.
Normally, quantum companies love to claim when some announcement seemingly validates their tech to some degree, and yet Diraq mentions IBM’s acquisition of HRL Laboratories almost as an afterthought. If we think about how much Big Blue has invested in superconducting qubits, it’s a seismic shift.
Yet Another Kind of Quantum Speedup
This one involves on-premises installations. QuEra notes that while cloud access can get the job done, teams may literally be a world apart. There’s an experimentally proven quantum collaborative advantage (they’re not calling it that) when you bring hardware and teams together. This link may require a LinkedIn account.
Podcast #87: Your entropy isn’t random enough.
I spoke with Denis Mandich, CTO of Qrypt, about his former-CIA point of view about quantum and cryptography, how Qrypt generates identical keys at multiple endpoints, why a non-certified single QRNG isn’t good enough, how the emergence of entanglement-based quantum networks would change his sales pitch, Nvidia’s role in Qrypt’s non-computing quantum technology, non-cryptographic QRNG applications, and more.
Aurora, assemble!
Dr. Christian Weedbrook shared a 20-second animation showing the assembly of Xanadu’s “Aurora” photonic quantum computer. This link may require an X account.
The Humpty Dumpty Qubit
I missed both Ewin Tang’s talk on the random purification channel and Prof. Patrick Hayden’s slides, but kudos to Iftach Yakar for turning them into a comic.
DeltaKit Community Fund
If Unitary Foundation and Riverlane had a baby, I guess it would be this. Instead of the usual $4,000 grant, this $4,000 grant is specifically for contributions to Riverlane’s Deltakit open-source Quantum Error Correction (QEC) software. Plus, it comes with Riverlane and Unitary Foundation mentorship.
