Electrons on Superfluid Helium with Nick Farina

EeroQ is unusual in two ways. It's the only company in the world commercializing electrons-on-helium qubits, a modality first proposed by Platzman and Dykman in Science in 1999. And it was founded by Nick Farina — a software entrepreneur, not a physicist — who got pulled into the field through a Chicago theater board where he met his future co-founder, then-PhD student Johannes Pollanen. This conversation matters now because EeroQ has had an unusually productive twelve months: a Physical Review X paper demonstrating single-electron control above 1 Kelvin, a January 2026 result on controlling up to a million electrons with fewer than 50 control lines, and — published in Nature Physics on June 15, 2026 — the first demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, the cavity-QED readout-and-control link the platform depends on. If you're trying to understand which "second-tier" modalities deserve serious attention — and how a small, capital-light team in Chicago is thinking about scale-first hardware design — this is a useful listen. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Outshift , Cisco 's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com . Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for . What We Get Into How a Chicago theater board led to one of the most unique qubit companies in the field Why electrons-on-helium failed in the early 2000s and why circuit QED, dry fridges, and CMOS now make it viable The physical picture: a thin superfluid helium film coating a CMOS chip, with electrons trapped a few nanometers above the surface by their own image charge Why EeroQ pivoted from motional states to spin qubits after Steve Lyon (Princeton) joined as CTO — and the predicted 10+ second coherence times that come with it The "build a quantum computer in reverse" philosophy: starting from a million-qubit architecture and working back toward two-qubit gates How the "Wonder Lake" chip controls 2,432 future qubit sites today, and why that's an engineering milestone rather than a qubit count Honest framing of where EeroQ actually is: no two-qubit gate demonstrated yet, with a tape-out target of ~10,000 qubits by late 2028 Why dipole-dipole gates come first and exchange gates come later, borrowing from the spin qubit playbook The case that scaling — not qubit quality — has been the field's slowest-moving problem over the last decade Resources & Links Guest & Company EeroQ — Company site for the only commercial electron-on-helium quantum hardware effort. <a href="https://eero