Electrons on Superfluid Helium with Nick Farina
Summary
What if the path to a million-qubit processor doesn't run through silicon defects or massive wire bundles, but through single electrons floating a few nanometers above a film of superfluid helium? Nick Farina, co-founder and CEO of EeroQ, joins Sebastian to explain why his team bet a decade on the only commercial electron-on-helium quantum computing platform — and what their recent results, including a new *Nature Physics* paper demonstrating strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, suggest about scaling, coherence, and the "wire problem."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.
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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.
- EeroQ Publications — Peer-reviewed papers and preprints from the team.
- Building a Quantum Computer in Reverse (EeroQ Blog, July 2023) — Farina's own articulation of the scale-first design philosophy discussed in the episode.
Key Papers
- Koolstra, Glen, Beysengulov et al., "Strong coupling of a microwave photon to an electron on helium," Nature Physics, June 2026 — First demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and the quantized motional state of a single electron on helium, including observation of vacuum Rabi splitting — establishing the cavity-QED readout link at the heart of EeroQ's architecture. This result was under embargo when the episode was recorded.
- Castoria et al., "Sensing and Control of Single Trapped Electrons Above 1 Kelvin," Physical Review X (2025) — The 1 K result Nick references; demonstrates charge sensing but not yet coherent spin manipulation.
- Koolstra et al., "High-impedance Resonators for Strong Coupling to an Electron on Helium," Physical Review Applied (Feb 2025) — The resonator architecture underlying EeroQ's cQED control approach.
- Electron-on-helium qubit (Wikipedia) — Useful overview including the original 1999 Platzman & Dykman Science proposal and Steve Lyon's 2006 spin-qubit paper in Physical Review A.
Press & Context
- EeroQ Makes World-First Breakthrough in Electron Qubits Floating on Helium (EeroQ, June 2026) — Company announcement of the Nature Physics strong-coupling result.
- EeroQ Solves the "Wire Problem" (PRNewswire, Jan 2026) — The million-electrons / fewer-than-50-wires result Nick cites.
- Individual electrons trapped and controlled above 1 K (Phys.org) — Independent coverage of the PRX paper.
- EeroQ Achieves Tape-Out of "Wonder Lake" Chip (The Quantum Insider, July 2023) — Background on the 2,432-site CMOS chip discussed in the episode.
Ecosystem
- Chicago Quantum Exchange — The regional consortium EeroQ benefits from.
- Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park — The state-backed quantum park anchored in Chicago.
Key Quotes & Insights
- On the contrarian thesis: "Scaling is actually the hardest part of building a quantum computer." Nick argues the field has made real strides on gate fidelity, error correction, and algorithms over the last decade — but not nearly enough on the path to hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits.
- On building in reverse: Rather than starting from a two-qubit gate and "hoping and praying to find ways to scale," EeroQ started by asking what a million-qubit processor would have to look like — which forced the choice of CMOS as the only manufacturing technology humanity has ever used to build features at that scale.
- On honest status: "We do not have an operational device." Nick is direct about where EeroQ is: ensemble control of 2,432 future qubit sites, single-electron control demonstrated, but no two-qubit gate yet. The 10,000-qubit tape-out target is late 2028.
- On modality identity: Electrons-on-helium borrows the cQED control toolkit from superconducting qubits, the natural-particle-as-qubit philosophy from trapped ions, and the exchange-gate concept from silicon spin qubits — while avoiding silicon's trap charges and valley splitting by lifting the electron out of the substrate entirely.
- On the superfluid: If you stirred superfluid helium in a glass, it would keep moving forever. The same property is what coats the EeroQ chip with a uniform thin film without any active plumbing.
Related Episodes
- Episode 82 — The Illinois Quantum Ecosystem with Harley Johnson — The regional context EeroQ operates in, including IQMP and the state's $500M+ quantum investment.
- Episode 59 — Silicon Spin Qubits with Andrew Dzurak from Diraq — A natural compare-and-contrast: spin qubits in silicon vs. spin qubits floating above helium.
- Episode 85 — Scaling Quantum Hardware Like Semiconductors with Matthijs Rijlaarsdam — Another scale-first hardware perspective, with a different architectural bet.
- Episode 81 — Quantum LDPC Error Correction with Larry Cohen and Paul Webster — Relevant to Nick's bet that QLDPC-style codes will benefit from EeroQ's all-to-all connectivity and electron mobility.
- Episode 18 — Neutral Atom Arrays with Alex Keesling of QuEra — Another "natural particle as qubit" architecture with mobile qubits and reconfigurable connectivity.
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