[DECODE Quantum] Meeting with Chris Ballance - Oxford Ionics

Un épisode 86 de Decode Quantum spécial dans lequel Sébastien Marie, CIO/CTO de Matmut nous interviewe. Pour une fois, nous sommes de l'autre côté du micro. 

Christian Weedbrook is the founder and CEO of Xanadu Quantum Technologies. He is an Australian-born physicist and entrepreneur based in Toronto, Canada.  He has a PhD in Physics from the University of Queensland, specializing in Quantum Information Theory.  He was a postdoc at the MIT and the University of Toronto. Initially, he attended film school with aspirations of becoming a director before returning to mathematics and science. He also explored several small-scale entrepreneurial projects, including selling heat packs and trading at local flea markets. In 2014, he launched CipherQ, which specialized in quantum security and cryptography. He then created Xanadu in 2016.

Sabrina Maniscalco is the CEO and cofounder of Algorithmiq, a startup developing quantum algorithms for applications in life sciences based in Helsinki. She is also a Professor of Quantum Information, Computing, and Logic at the University of Helsinki. ​Beforehand, she held academic positions in Sofia, Durban, Turku, and Edinburgh, before returning to Finland in 2014 to lead the Theoretical Physics Laboratory in Turku. She moved to the University of Helsinki in 2020, coinciding with the founding of Algorithmiq. ​She’s done research on noise in quantum devices, complex quantum systems, and quantum simulations.

Welcome to the 83rd episode of Decode Quantum, the quantum podcast where we like to get in depth in quantum science and technology, this time with Wilhelm Kaenders, the president and CTO of Toptica. Wilhelm Kaenders is the co-founder of Toptica, because he had one other co-founder. He is now its president and CTO. The company is a worldwide leader in lasers used in mostly the academic world, but also in some parts of the industry. Wilhelm did his PhD in quantum physics at the Institute of Quantum Optics in Hanover, in the group of Dieter Meschede. He was behind the technology of the group of Theodor Hänsch at the Max Planck Institute, who became the laureate of the Nobel Prize in physics exactly 20 years ago, 2005. He pioneered the business of tunable diode laser technology and contributed to the development of the technology of the optical frequency comb. He created Toptica in 1998, which is probably one of the oldest companies in the enabling tech for quantum technology. https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2025/decode-quantum-with-wilhelm-kaenders-from-toptica 

Welcome to the 82th episode of Decode Quantum, this time, with Chris Ballance, the cofounder and CEO of Oxford Ionics. Chris Ballance is the cofounder and CEO of Oxford Ionics since its inception in 2019. His cofounder is Tom Harty who is the company’s CTO. Before that, he was a senior researcher at Oxford University, where he did his PhD between 2010 and 2015. Transcript : https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2025/decode-quantum-with-chris-ballance-from-oxford-ionics

Welcome to this 81st episode of Decode Quantum, or interviews around the world about quantum. Fanny Bouton andOlivier Ezratty were with Mathieu Munsch from QNAMI, the CEO. Mathieu Munsch is the CEO and co-founder of QNAMI, a Swiss startup located in Basel, specializing in NV-center quantum sensors. Born in France, he was first trained in optics semiconductors and spintronics before turning to research in quantum physics. After obtaining his PhD at the Institut Néel in Grenoble, he continued his postdoctoral work on the manipulation and detection of quantum dot single spins, particularly quantum dot single spins. At the University of Basel, he launched Qnami in 2017 to commercialize sensors that perform very high-resolution magnetic imaging.Full transcript: https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2025/decode-quantum-with-mathieu-munsch-from-qnami/ 

Welcome to the 80th episode of the Decode Quantum podcast series. We are this time with Chris Langer from Quantinuum. This is one of the leading companies using trapped ions for the creation of quantum computers. Our guest Chris Langer is a Fellow at Quantinuum. He is their chair of the Technical Board and an advisor to the President and COO. Chris has a PhD in physics obtained in 2006 at the University of Colorado on trapped ions quantum computing under the supervision of David Wineland, Nobel laureate in physics in 2012, who was a guest of this very podcast in July 2024. Chris is a key contributor to the development of Quantinuum’s hardware. Before joining Quantinuum (which was then initially Honeywell Quantum Systems) in 2016, Chris worked for 10 years at Lockheed Martin on various projects in the aerospace domain. Full transcript: https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2025/decode-quantum-with-chris-langer-from-quantinuum/ 

Welcome to the 79th episode of “Decode Quantum”. We continue our “international episodes”, this times with the cofounders of the US startup EeroQ, Nick Farina and Johannes Pollanen, which aims to create qubits with electron spins, electrons being shielded from controlling electronic circuits by a layer of superfluid helium. This is the only company doing this. Nick Farina is the CEO and co-founder of EeroQ in 2017. Beforehand, he worked as an business angel investor, and an entrepreneur, launching multiple tech startups (GiftedHire for online job search, Voltage Digital a digital agency, JetZet providing itinerary management tools to business travelers). He’s the one bringing business acumen to the company. He is also a Quantum Computing Governance Member at the World Economic Forum since 2021. In 2000-2003, he was a caddie at a golf club (Biltmore Country Club) where he spent summers watching people cheat at golf and lament their losses in tech stocks. Johannes Pollanen is a co-founder and the Chief Science Officer of EeroQ. He is a researcher from Michigan State University (MSU) where he holds the Cowen chair of Distinguished Chair in Experimental Physics. He is also Associate Director of the MSU Center for Quantum Computing Science and Engineering. He runs the Laboratory for Hybrid Quantum Systems, which is focused on hybrid quantum technologies involving superconducting qubits, superfluids, trapped electrons, and other condensed matter systems. He developed the EeroQ electrons on superfluid helium architecture. He did his PhD at Northwestern University with Bill Halperin and contributed to the discovery of new quantum phases in superfluid helium-3, which influenced his later work in designing quantum computing platforms. He then was a post-doc at Caltech, with Jim Eisenstein, working on exotic many-body states in ultra-clean semiconductor systems.And as usual the transcript : https://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2025/decode-quantum-with-nick-farina-and-johannes-pollanen-from-eeroq

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.