Quantum’s Wild Week
The week quantum research smashed timelines and regulators and industry organizations yelled “Move faster!”
This week has been one for the quantum history books. On a single day (Sept 25), a cascade of breakthroughs had me literally jumping out of my seat! From governments issuing calls to action, to standards bodies pushing out new guidelines, to jaw-dropping leaps in quantum hardware and algorithms - the developments came fast and furious.
It’s the perfect week to re-launch this weekly newsletter, which will now hit your inbox every weekend, distilling the biggest quantum tech news. And what a relaunch:
Government & industry leaders are shouting “the time to move on post-quantum security is NOW,” backed by new White House priorities, international guidance, and fresh standards (NIST, etc.).
Meanwhile, quantum researchers delivered not incremental improvements but giant leaps: a startup achieved in 2025 more than what they thought might happen in 2030, a university scaled qubit arrays by 5× to 6× overnight, a new algorithmic method sped up error-corrected computing by 50×, and a photonic experiment slashed a learning task from 20 million years to 15 minutes. Even in finance, HSBC and IBM showed a 34% performance boost from quantum - an unheard-of gain in an industry where even 3.4% would turn heads. (Four breakthroughs in just this one week have a potential impact on the Q-Day arrival!).
In short, this week’s news wasn’t business-as-usual - it was more like quantum technology hitting the turbo boost.
Strap in as I break it down by category below! Each item highlights what happened, why it matters, and whether it brings us closer to “Q-Day” - the day quantum computers can crack our encryption.
Enjoy the deep dive!
Quantum Tech Breakthroughs: Giant Leaps, Not Baby Steps
“Transversal Algorithmic Fault Tolerance” - 10×-100× Speedup in Quantum Error Correction
Harvard, Yale and QuEra researchers unveiled a new framework called Transversal Algorithmic Fault Tolerance (AFT) that massively reduces the time overhead of error-corrected quantum computation.
In essence, their approach uses clever transversal gates and one-round error syndrome extraction to correct errors “on the fly” at the algorithm level rather than doing many slow cycles after each gate.
The result? They project 10× to 100× faster execution of algorithms on a fully error-corrected quantum computer. For example, applying AFT to Shor’s algorithm showed that factoring a 2048-bit RSA number could theoretically drop from months to 5.6 days on a future million-qubit machine - about 50× faster than prior estimates.
Why it matters: This is a big deal because even if we have enough qubits, the time to run algorithms was another barrier (imagine a code-breaking run taking months - still impractical). AFT tackles that by slashing the runtime penalty of error correction (they only do 1 syndrome round vs d rounds per operation). It’s a fundamentally new way to run quantum circuits more efficiently.
Q-Day impact: Absolutely yes. By cutting the time (with the same qubit count), the threshold for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer comes much closer. One could break RSA in under a week instead of several months - meaning the moment a million-qubit machine exists, it’s immediately a serious threat, not a slow science project. As my analysis concluded, this breakthrough could move up Q-Day and certainly ups the urgency for deploying quantum-safe encryption.
My analysis: New Paper Alert: “Low‑Overhead Transversal Fault Tolerance for Universal Quantum Computation”
Original paper: Low-overhead transversal fault tolerance for universal quantum computation
Caltech’s 6,100-Qubit Neutral Atom Array - Largest Ever
Caltech physicists blew past previous records by creating an array of 6,100 neutral-atom qubits held in optical tweezers. (The prior state-of-art in neutral atoms was on the order of a few hundred qubits.)
They achieved this by splitting a laser into 12,000 traps to hold cesium atoms, ending up with 6,100 occupied sites. Crucially, even at this scale each qubit stayed coherent (superposition) for ~13 seconds and single-qubit operations reached 99.98% accuracy - maintaining quality at quantity. They could even shuttle atoms around within the array without losing coherence.
Why it matters: This is the largest quantum register ever assembled by a huge margin (≈5-6× bigger than previous). It demonstrates neutral-atom platforms can combine high qubit counts with high fidelity, a combo needed for error correction on thousands of qubits. As one researcher put it, “quantity and quality” together. This paves the way toward thousands of physical qubits being manipulated for, say, a surface code.
Q-Day impact: Yes, potentially - we’ll likely need a million of physical qubits for breaking RSA, but jumping from ~1k to 6k in one go is a dramatic step toward that regime. It suggests that with neutral atoms, scaling isn’t the bottleneck some feared. If such leaps continue (and error correction is implemented on these thousands), a cryptographically relevant quantum computer comes into view sooner.
My analysis: Caltech’s 6,100-Qubit Optical Tweezer Array: A Quantum Leap in Scale and Coherence
Original paper: A tweezer array with 6100 highly coherent atomic qubits
Alice & Bob’s 1-Hour “Cat Qubit” - Fault-Tolerance Ahead of Schedule
Quantum startup Alice & Bob achieved a stunner - their novel superconducting “cat qubit” remained stable (no bit-flip errors) for about one hour (!!!) That’s a new world record for any superconducting qubit, obliterating the previous ~7-minute coherence record from last year. In fact, they only expected to hit ~13 minutes by 2030, but hit 60 minutes now!
Why it matters: An hour-long coherence means error rates millions of times lower than usual. In practical terms, error correction overhead could drop from needing thousands of physical qubits per logical qubit to maybe just tens. Alice & Bob themselves note this could make their machines “hundreds of times more hardware-efficient” - think quantum computers that might fit in a room instead of a warehouse. It basically fast-tracks the timeline for a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
Q-Day impact: Definitely yes - by reducing errors, a future code-breaking quantum computer would require far fewer qubits than previously feared. As my analysis notes, this breakthrough could accelerate Q-Day, since a stable, error-corrected quantum machine now looks closer at hand.
My analysis: Alice & Bob’s One-Hour”Cat Qubit” Breakthrough – What It Means for Quantum Computing and Q-Day
Original blog post: Just Out of the Lab: A Cat Qubit That Jumps Every Hour
Silicon Spin Qubits Hit 99%+ Fidelity in a 300 mm Chip Fab
A research team from Diraq (Australia) and imec (Belgium) showed that silicon-based spin qubits can be fabricated using standard 300 mm semiconductor manufacturing - and achieve better than 99% gate fidelity on every operation.
They made four two-qubit test chips on one wafer, all with error rates <1% for both single- and two-qubit gates. Even state prep and measurement were 99.9%. This basically proves you can mass-produce quantum chips in a regular CMOS fab with quality high enough for error correction.
Why it matters: Scalability, scalability, scalability! Unlike exotic qubit tech that needs handmade devices, these qubits piggyback on industry-standard processes - think “Intel Inside” for quantum. It opens a path to millions of qubits by leveraging existing chip factories. Also, hitting the 99% fidelity threshold means these qubits are at the brink of being usable for fault-tolerant logic (they’re approaching surface-code error thresholds).
Q-Day impact: Absolutely yes - as my analysis puts it, every hurdle overcome (like scalable fab and high fidelity) shortens the road to a crypto-breaking quantum computer. If we can build large arrays of qubits using silicon fabs, the “engineering challenge” of Q-Day becomes much easier. This result suggests the timeline to a large-scale quantum machine is contracting.
My analysis: Silicon Spin Qubits Achieve >99% Fidelity in 300‑mm Foundry Fabrication
Original paper: Industry-compatible silicon spin-qubit unit cells exceeding 99% fidelity
Quantum Learning Advantage - 15 Minutes vs 20 Million Years
In an incredible experiment, researchers from DTU (Denmark) and collaborators demonstrated a provable quantum advantage in a machine learning task using a photonic quantum setup.
By entangling light and using a special optical measurement scheme, they learned the “noise pattern” of a system in just 15 minutes, whereas the best classical approach would take an estimated 20 million years!
This result, published in Science, is dubbed “Quantum learning advantage on a scalable photonic platform.” It’s the first-ever quantum advantage shown for a photonic system.
Why it matters: This isn’t a mere supremacy demo on a contrived math problem - it’s a practical learning task (noise characterization) with clear implications for sensing and engineering. It shows quantum entanglement can extract information exponentially faster than classical methods in certain scenarios. It’s also done with fairly straightforward optical tech, suggesting such advantages might be implementable in real-world sensing devices.
Q-Day impact: Not directly - this experiment doesn’t factor numbers or break encryption, and it doesn’t make our general-purpose quantum computers more powerful overnight. So it likely doesn’t move the Q-Day timeline. However, it proves quantum systems can vastly outperform classical for real tasks, which will only spur more investment and interest in quantum tech broadly. (In other words, it’s a morale boost for the field.) The techniques here might even inspire new quantum algorithms.
My analysis: Researchers Demonstrate Quantum Entanglement Can Slash a 20-Million-Year Learning Task Down to Minutes
Original paper: Quantum learning advantage on a scalable photonic platform
HSBC & IBM’s 34% Quantum Boost in Trading - First Financial Quantum Boost
Banking giant HSBC, working with IBM, announced the first-ever quantum-enabled improvement in live financial trading analytics. In a bond trading pilot, they used a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm to predict fill rates for bond orders, and it delivered up to a 34% improvement in accuracy over the best classical method. (Traders, pick your jaws off the floor - a 34% edge is enormous in markets!) This was run on IBM’s Quantum systems (the Heron processors), generating quantum-derived features that improved a machine learning model.
Why it matters: It’s tangible proof of quantum computing’s commercial value - not in some distant future, but today. Financial firms have been cautiously watching quantum; now HSBC has shown it can confer a real competitive edge (better pricing predictions = better trading outcomes). This could trigger a domino effect of banks investing in quantum tech. It’s also a milestone for quantum machine learning in a real dataset with business impact.
Q-Day impact: No direct impact on the timeline for breaking encryption - this was about optimization/prediction, not cryptography. So it doesn’t make quantum computers more dangerous to RSA, etc., in any immediate sense. However, by validating the utility of quantum computing, it likely accelerates industry investment into bigger and better quantum computers. And more investment + competition does indirectly hasten the arrival of more powerful devices (including those that could be turned to cryptanalysis). So one could argue it indirectly inches up the pace. But for now, Q-Day isn’t nearer because of this - what’s nearer is the day your financial firm starts using quantum for an edge.
My analysis: HSBC and IBM’s Quantum-Enabled Bond Trading Breakthrough
Original paper (preprint): Enhanced fill probability estimates in institutional algorithmic bond trading using statistical learning algorithms with quantum computers
Press release: HSBC demonstrates world’s first-known quantum-enabled algorithmic trading with IBM
Policy & Readiness: Calls to Get Post-Quantum Ready Now
White House Puts Quantum at Top of FY2027 R&D Priorities
In a new FY27 budget memo, the U.S. administration put quantum science and tech front-and-center alongside AI. Agencies are directed to prioritize quantum R&D, from fundamental science to applied engineering, to ensure American leadership. This shows Washington isn’t treating quantum as sci-fi - it’s a strategic national focus (think “Space Race” vibes, but for qubits).
Why it matters: More federal support means faster progress in quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography.
Q-Day impact: Indirectly yes - boosting quantum research could accelerate breakthroughs that eventually produce encryption-cracking machines.
My analysis: White House FY2027 R&D Memo Puts Quantum Technologies Front and Center
Original memo: M-25-34 I NSTM-2
Australian Government (ACSC) Post-Quantum Plan - “Start Now, Finish by 2030”
Australia’s cyber security agency (ACSC) issued updated guidance titled “Planning for Post-Quantum Cryptography”, warning that cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) are coming and could break RSA/ECC. They urge all organizations to begin migrating to PQC immediately, setting milestones: have a transition plan by 2026, begin implementing by 2028, and complete the shift by 2030. The subtext: don’t procrastinate or assume “quantum threats are far-off” - the quantum clock is ticking.
Why it matters: This adds to a global chorus (U.S. NIST, U.K. NCSC, etc.) saying quantum readiness and crypto-agility are now a must, not a maybe.
Q-Day impact: The guidance doesn’t make Q-Day arrive sooner, but it greatly reduces impact - if followed, our data will be safe before quantum hackers arrive.
My analysis: ACSC’s Post-Quantum Plan: Start Now, Plan for Longer Execution
Original guidance: Planning for post-quantum cryptography
FS-ISAC’s Global Call to Coordinate PQC Migration
The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), a global banking cybersecurity consortium, released a major white paper urging the financial sector worldwide to synchronize their post-quantum migration timelines. It lays out a global transition roadmap with clear milestones and emphasizes the risk of “crypto-procrastination” (delaying until it’s too late). Notably, this paper was co-developed with banks and orgs across US, EU, and Canada - showing a united front.
Why it matters: Finance is arguably the industry most at risk from Q-Day, and if banks coordinate, they can pressure vendors, regulators, and everyone in the supply chain to get quantum-safe. This is basically the financial world saying “We refuse to be caught off-guard by quantum”.
Q-Day impact: Again, doesn’t hasten Q-Day itself, but if banks follow through, a “Q-Day” would be a non-event for them (no broken trades or stolen funds).
My analysis: FS-ISAC’s New Roadmap for Post-Quantum Migration in Finance
Original paper: The Timeline for Post Quantum Cryptographic Migration
Press release: FS-ISAC Urges Global Coordination for Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography in Financial Services
NIST’s New Standards & Frameworks for PQC
This week NIST dropped two big deliverables in its post-quantum cryptography program. First, NIST Special Publication 800-227 - a finalized standard with recommendations for using Key-Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) in practice. This document is essentially a “how-to” for deploying PQC key exchange, complementing the new algorithms with guidance on implementation, key management, and integration. It ensures that as we roll out lattice-based KEMs (like Kyber’s variant standardized as ML-KEM), we do it right.
Second, NIST released CSWP 48 (Initial Draft), a white paper mapping out how to incorporate PQC migration into the well-known NIST Cybersecurity Framework and NIST controls. This helps organizations slot “crypto-inventory, agility and migration” activities into their existing risk management processes.
Why it matters: These publications give very concrete guidance - moving PQC from theory to real-world deployment checklists. It’s no longer just “pick an algorithm,” but “here’s how you execute a migration.”
Q-Day impact: While standards don’t accelerate the advent of Q-Day, they significantly mitigate its threat - NIST is making sure that by the time a quantum computer can crack crypto, everyone has had both the tools and instructions to switch over.
My analysis of SP 800-227: NIST Releases NIST SP 800-227 Recommendations for Key-Encapsulation Mechanisms
NIST publication: NIST SP 800-227 - Recommendations for Key-Encapsulation Mechanisms
My analysis of CSWP 48 IPD: NIST Releases NIST CSWP 48 IPD – Mapping of Migration to PQC Project to NIST CSF 2.0
New on PostQuantum.com
This week’s new article from my blog offers an in-depth look at what a full-scale quantum readiness program really entails. Using a large telecom as a case study, it illustrates how preparing for quantum threats is a decade-long marathon touching every layer of technology and operations – far more than a simple “patch”. The telco’s journey illustrated here is meant as a template for any big enterprise starting its post-quantum migration.
The article delivers practical insight into the phases, challenges, and immense scale of becoming quantum-safe, reinforcing that every organization (not just telcos) should be charting this course.
The article: Quantum-Readiness / PQC Full Program Description (Telecom Example)
From the PostQuantum.com Archive
This piece from PostQuantum.com archives is a practical guide for CISOs on how to assemble a quantum readiness team from skills most organizations already have. Instead of hunting for rare quantum cryptographers, it shows how to map existing expertise - cryptography engineers, PKI/HSM specialists, network and application security staff, compliance and vendor management teams - into a coordinated program for post-quantum migration.
The article outlines the key domains (from cryptographic inventory to governance, testing, and data management) and explains who in the enterprise can own each function, and how to upskill them where needed.
The takeaway: the talent to get quantum-ready is likely already in-house - CISOs just need to mobilize it into a structured, crypto-agility playbook.
The article: The Skill Stack a CISO Needs for Crypto‑Agility and Quantum Readiness
That’s a wrap for this breathtaking week! Governments are pressing the accelerator on quantum readiness, and researchers are smashing expectations in quantum computing capability. The message is loud and clear: quantum technology is advancing on all fronts - faster than predicted.
As I restart this newsletter, I couldn’t have asked for a more exhilarating set of stories to cover. Stay tuned for next week’s update - if it’s even a fraction as eventful as this one, you won’t want to miss it. Quantum on!