5 published posts.
A caesium atom comes with its frequency fixed by nature. A transmon's frequency is whatever the cleanroom produced, and it drifts. Four experiments, invented for atoms and nuclei long before anyone built an artificial atom, turn a patch of aluminium into something you can program: Rabi, T1, Ramsey and echo. What each one measures, what the fits mean, and why the job is never finished.
Google now estimates that a superconducting quantum computer with fewer than half a million qubits could recover a Bitcoin or Ethereum private key in about nine minutes, and it backed the claim with a zero-knowledge proof that Trail of Bits then forged. What the numbers assume, how close today's hardware is to them, and what it means for Solana, from someone who spends her days on superconducting qubits.
Most pictures of a qubit show a glowing particle. The qubits inside Google's and IBM's machines are circuits you can see under an ordinary microscope. How a capacitor and one strange junction make an artificial atom, why it has to be big and boring, and why it needs a fridge colder than space.
Two months into a PhD on superconducting qubits, I watched the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics go to the experiment my whole field stands on. What Clarke, Devoret and Martinis showed in 1985, the equations behind it, and how it leads to the qubits my group works on.
Part 4 of Zero Knowledge, Full Proof. Ethereum has just finished the largest trusted-setup ceremony ever run. What the ceremony protects against, why some proof systems need one and others do not, and what a large quantum computer would do to each of them.
