The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology

Every commercial neutral-atom quantum computer today encodes information in just two energy levels of an atom that has many more — strontium has ten nuclear-spin levels, cesium has sixteen. Ivan Deutsch, one of the founding theorists of neutral-atom quantum computing, joins the podcast to ask whether binary is really the right base for quantum computation, and to make the case for spin cat codes: a fault-tolerant encoding that embeds a qubit inside the richer structure of a qudit, the way bosonic cat codes use microwave cavities. Along the way, Ivan traces three decades at UNM — from the earliest days of quantum information science to his role building Elevate Quantum, the only federally designated quantum Tech Hub in the United States.

Show Notes

Are We Computing Quantum in the Wrong Base? with Ivan Deutsch


Ivan Deutsch is Distinguished Regents' Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico and the founding director of CQuIC, the Center for Quantum Information and Control. Along with his longtime collaborator Poul Jessen, Ivan helped lay the theoretical foundations for neutral-atom quantum computing in the 1990s: trapping individual atoms in optical lattices, cooling them to near absolute zero, and shuttling them in parallel to perform quantum logic. The companies commercializing those ideas today — QuEra, Pasqal, Atom Computing, Infleqtion, and the newly announced Aurora out of Caltech — are building on architectural concepts that trace directly to his group's early papers. His 9,600+ citations across quantum information, atomic physics, and quantum control place him among the most-cited theorists in the field.

The reason to talk to Ivan now is that he has been making a quietly heterodox argument: every one of those commercial platforms encodes information in two energy levels of an atom that has ten or sixteen, and Ivan thinks the field should be asking whether that's the right choice — not for information density, which is only a logarithmic gain, but for fault tolerance. This conversation goes deep on qudits, spin cat codes, and the co-design philosophy that has shaped Ivan's career at the interface between theory and experiment, ions and neutral atoms, and academia and industry. If you are following neutral-atom hardware, fault-tolerant quantum error correction, or the emergence of regional quantum ecosystems, this episode is essential.

What You'll Learn

  • Why neutral atoms were the "underdog cousins" of trapped ions — and the precise trade-off at the heart of a 30-year rivalry: ions are great and terrible because they're charged; neutral atoms are great and terrible because they're neutral
  • What the original neutral-atom quantum computing paper actually got right: the parallel atom-movement architecture now central to QuEra, Atom Computing, and Infleqtion's roadmaps was already there — even if the Rydberg blockade's full power wasn't appreciated until later
  • What qudits are and why fault tolerance, not information density, is the compelling argument: the information gain from base-2 to base-10 is only logarithmic, but co-designing error-correcting codes with the physical structure of the hardware may be transformative
  • How spin cat codes work: using the extra energy levels inside a single atom for error redundancy, directly analogous to bosonic cat codes in microwave cavities, with fault-tolerant thresholds that may surpass standard qubit surface codes
  • Why biased error correction matters: real physical errors in neutral atoms aren't arbitrary, and codes designed around the dominant error channels — including leakage and erasure — can dramatically outperform worst-case generic schemes
  • How leakage becomes an asset: when population escapes the qubit subspace into other levels, detecting that escape converts it from an unknown error into an erasure error, which is far easier to correct
  • Why working at interfaces is where the creative work happens: Ivan's career has been built at the boundary between theory and experiment, between ion-trap and neutral-atom communities, and now between research and industry
  • How New Mexico became a quantum hub: the founding of QNM-I, the partnership with Colorado, and the Elevate Quantum Tech Hub — turning decades of national-lab and university strength into an actual industrial ecosystem

Resources & Links

Guest Links
Key Papers
Talks & Context
Ecosystem
Field Context
Key Quotes & Insights
"Ions are great because they're charged. You can hold onto them very tightly and manipulate them extremely precisely. Ions are terrible because they're charged — you can't push many together and they all talk to one another."  — Ivan Deutsch, on the fundamental ion/neutral-atom trade-off at the heart of a 30-year platform rivalry

"I don't want to be an evangelist, because I don't really feel I've studied this well enough to say we really should do quantum computation base-10 rather than base-two. But I think it's an important question." — Ivan Deutsch, on qudits — a carefully calibrated position from a theorist making a strong technical bet

"We just wanted to make the whole thing faster." — Steve Rolston (Ivan's co-author), on the mindset behind the Rydberg blockade paper, which ultimately unlocked the entire commercial neutral-atom industry

Insight: The spin cat code argument does not rest on storing more information per atom — it rests on using extra energy levels to give error correction information about the hardware's dominant failure modes. Co-designing the code with the physics, not against it, is the underlying idea.

"New Mexico is a quantum state." — Ivan Deutsch

Related Episodes


Stay in the Ecosystem

The neutral-atom and fault-tolerance story is one of the most active fronts in quantum computing right now — hardware milestones, new companies, and theoretical bets like qudits and spin cat codes are all converging. If you want to follow it:
If this episode made you think differently about the qubit assumption at the heart of every commercial quantum computer today — share it with someone who should hear that question.


Creators and Guests

Guest
Ivan Deutsch
Distinguished & Regents'​ Professor, University of New Mexico

What is The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology?

Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, interviews brilliant research scientists, software developers, engineers and others actively exploring the possibilities of our new quantum era. We will cover topics in quantum computing, networking and sensing, focusing on hardware, algorithms and general theory. The show aims for accessibility - Sebastian is not a physicist - and we'll try to provide context for the terminology and glimpses at the fascinating history of this new field as it evolves in real time.

Sebastian Hassinger (00:01.438)
Ivan, thank you very much for joining me today. I've been, as you know, we started talking about getting you on the podcast at least six or months ago or more. I think we actually talked about it even earlier than that. But one of the reasons I was really wanting to get you on is that you were, you joined, think, New Mexico, University of New Mexico in maybe 1995 or early nineties or mid nineties, right when Shor's sort of

was creating a buzz and just sort of, I would love to hear your journey from, you know, PhD at UC Berkeley to position at University of New Mexico. What was quantum like in those super early days?

Ivan Deutsch (00:47.226)
Oh yeah, that's exciting. you know, I finished my PhD at the end of 1992. At that time, we already started to learn. I did my PhD in quantum optics. I worked in quantum optics because I was interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics. And when I started my PhD in 1987, that was the time when Alan S. Bay did his experiment.

And that's what got me hooked. I really so I got into that. I was interested in understanding the foundations of quantum mechanics and those many of us in quantum optics. That's why we did that. And one of the things that was starting to happen around that time was a few ideas like quantum cryptography. And Arthur Ecker.

was kind of an evangelist. He came, would come to quantum optics meetings and he taught us in plenary sessions about quantum key distribution and the like. mean, BB84 had already existed, but it hadn't really permeated the community. So we started to get the idea that, you know, quantum information was a thing, that if we can harness the special powers of quantum mechanics, we could do things that were not possible.

Sebastian Hassinger (01:46.53)
Mm-hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (02:14.65)
if world were processed according to classical. So I wasn't working in that area at the time. I was working on optical communications, sending information over optical fibers. I did my postdoc at France Telecom, actually. And when I came back to the US in 1993, in 1994, actually Art Durer,

Sebastian Hassinger (02:33.134)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (02:41.85)
came and gave a colloquium at NIST, where I was a postdoc at that time, and told us about Shor's algorithm. And NIST then hosted a conference, invited Shor in 1994 to give a talk, and with a lot of the real early people in the field to talk about this. And I was

blown away. I didn't, of course, understand Schur's algorithm, but I was very excited about the whole thing. And that time I was looking for a faculty position. And Carl Cades, who was one of my heroes when I was a student and was here at UNM, and contacted me that there was a potential opening. And so.

I was a big city guy and moving to Albuquerque was a little scary, but this opportunity was incredible and I was very, very lucky to get the position. And so I came to UNM to work together with Carl to build this program in Quantum. were one of the first, and Carl was a real pioneer. And at that time there was something that he called

Sebastian Hassinger (03:41.741)
Hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (04:00.226)
Mm-hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (04:04.186)
the information physics group. wasn't called quantum information. was really about this connection between information and physics predated quantum information. And people like Wojciech Zurek at Los Alamos and others were real pioneers around 1990, late 80s on this. So that was that. so that was

Sebastian Hassinger (04:07.032)
Hmm. Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (04:33.102)
before quantum error correction. was just after Schor's algorithm. Yeah, exactly. And so it all unfolded really quickly at that time. I remember Howard Barnum, who was a PhD student at that time, came in and brought this paper on error correction to us. And we talked about it. It was all really an exciting time. So I

Sebastian Hassinger (04:35.575)
Mm-hmm. Right in that brief moment.

Sebastian Hassinger (04:46.126)
Amazing.

Ivan Deutsch (04:59.646)
you know decided that that's the direction i wanted to go in and yeah

Sebastian Hassinger (05:04.62)
Yeah, I mean, obviously it worked well. You're still at UNM. So the program that you founded, you've been there for now 25 years, right? 30 years. Amazing. Amazing. So you made the transition from Big C to the high desert. Obviously UNM has its own strengths, but how...

Ivan Deutsch (05:13.882)
30 years, 30 years, 30 years. yeah.

Ivan Deutsch (05:23.162)
You're right.

Sebastian Hassinger (05:29.698)
big a role did Sandia and Los Alamos being neighbors play in that, in the longevity, the center of gravity?

Ivan Deutsch (05:36.608)
Right. So, yeah, I mean, in those early days in the 1990s, Los Alamos was truly one of the most important places for the foundations of quantum information science. you know, some of the luminaries, I mean, of course, there was Niel and Laflamme and Zurich and the theory side, an unsung hero.

is Richard Hughes, who had a very early program in quantum key distribution, ion trap quantum computing in those days. And Los Alamos, we worked closely, Carl and I, the folks at Los Alamos. And we would meet regularly. And that was a big part of it. At that time, Sandia did not have a program. Their program really was launched

around a decade later in 2005. In fact, I gave a short course at Sandia to all the managers and the staff scientists that was organized to kind of give people an introduction. And Sandia went in very, very rapidly and expanded their program and their

Sebastian Hassinger (06:45.582)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (07:01.433)
probably the largest effort in all of the national laboratories in quantum information science and engineering is at Sandia. So that unfolded a little bit later, that, you know, but that the assets here in New Mexico between UNM, Los Alamos, Sandia is really, yeah, something that we feel is a real strength.

Sebastian Hassinger (07:26.978)
Yeah. You mentioned trapped ions work at Los Alamos. had Dan Stick on not too long ago, maybe a year and a half ago, talking about his big enchilada trap. How did you, with the trapped ion work going on at Los Alamos, where was your transition into neutral labs? Because that's really where you've made a giant splash in your research.

Ivan Deutsch (07:39.832)
Yeah.

Ivan Deutsch (07:51.534)
Right. Yeah. So that's really what my back on it. So when I was a postdoc at NIST with Bill Phillips, Bill Phillips is one of the Nobel laureates who invented laser cooling, which was an important step towards being able to control and manipulate. You know, I was famously Bill's first and last theory postdoc. was it's an experimental group. So I learned all about, you know,

atoms and laser cooling there. I also met my good friend and longtime collaborator, Paul Yesen. He was one of Bill's students and he graduated around the time. he and I, so Paul joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson the year before I came, you know, and in the Southwest that's next door and to Albuquerque. we

Sebastian Hassinger (08:45.55)
Yeah.

Ivan Deutsch (08:49.005)
He reached out to me and he said, look, I'm going to write this review article on optical lattices. Optical lattices were a new idea of how you can, it was based on Pol's dissertation and what I worked on as a postdoc of how you, in laser-cooled samples, individual atoms are trapped in the bright spots of an interference pattern of

a set of intersecting laser beams. It's kind of an artificial crystal. so, Pol and I, at that time, were trying, we were inspired by what was going on in ion traps. In ion traps, the work, you know, really pioneered by Dave Wineland at NIST, the Nobel Prize winner in 2012 for his work on control of individual quantum systems.

So we were inspired by that. And we said, well, we can do the same thing with neutral atoms rather than ions. And there's a long story. I mean, the neutral atom, cold atoms versus cold ionic atoms, they're kind of frenemies. They compete with one another. What's going to be the best clock? What's the most precise? What's the most accurate? There's a trade-off. Ions are great.

because they're charged. You can hold onto them very tightly and you can manipulate them extremely precisely. ions are terrible because they're charged. And because they're charged, you can't push many ions together in a single trap and they all talk to one another and you have long chains of them. Neutral atoms are great because they're neutral.

Sebastian Hassinger (10:24.568)
Mm-hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (10:29.805)
Ha ha ha ha.

Sebastian Hassinger (10:34.093)
Right.

Ivan Deutsch (10:43.765)
And so you can get a ton of them together and you can get a million of them maybe in one optical lattice. But neutral atoms are terrible because they're neutral. And so how are you going to get them to talk to one another? I was inspired by what was going on in the ion traps. And Paul and I worked very hard in those early years.

Sebastian Hassinger (10:57.25)
Ha ha ha.

Right.

Ivan Deutsch (11:10.921)
in trying to push the kind of technology that was being developed for ions to neutrals. That means being able to trap individual atoms and cool them all the way to near absolute zero, to near the ground state. did the first experiment on so-called sideband cooling in optical lattices and the way in which we would manipulate the motion of the control, the motion of the atoms.

and entangle that with the internal states. So there are a lot of initial experiments that were done. And Paul and I, we worked together for 25 years in developing this. And so that's what happened. And one last thing I would say. inspired by this, in 1997, I organized a workshop called Quantum Control of Atomic Motion, which

had Dave Wineland, Reiner Blatt from the IATRAP, and a lot of the neutral atom people like Hideo Mabuchi and Paul Yassin and others. And we hosted this series of workshops for two years. And that workshop became what we turned into a broader workshop called Southwest Quantum Information and Technology, which is SQUINT.

And squint is now in its 26th year as one of the bigs. So this idea of bringing together the ion trap and the tools and techniques that were being developed in ion traps for controlling individual ions, which was the foundation of quantum logic, we were transferring to thinking about that for neutrals.

Sebastian Hassinger (12:38.19)
Mm-hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (12:59.361)
Yeah.

And of course the interaction that you were saying is difficult to get with neutral items is critical because you need to get entanglement. You need to get two qubit operations, et cetera, for universal quantum computing. So the Rydberg or Rydberg, I've heard it pronounced both ways. don't know Rydberg. Okay. Rydberg blockade is the excited state that you can put this neutral item into that allows you to do that, that entanglement.

Ivan Deutsch (13:11.169)
Right.

Ivan Deutsch (13:17.484)
Yeah, it's RIDBURG. Yeah.

Ivan Deutsch (13:26.305)
Right.

Sebastian Hassinger (13:29.487)
is that, was that part of, the, did you, were you part of that?

Ivan Deutsch (13:33.4)
No, we didn't have that idea. So that came a little bit later. The original proposal was one where we would excite the atom to a much lower excited state. we envision how and but when the atoms are so the thing that's amazing about the Rydberg state is when the atom is excited to a very high lying orbital, the electron is barely bound and

Sebastian Hassinger (13:36.439)
Okay.

Sebastian Hassinger (13:45.518)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (14:02.421)
it can feel the presence of an atom that is microns away. mean, that's macroscopic from the scale of an atom, is typically orders of magnitude smaller. An angstrom is 10 to the minus 10 meters versus 10 to the third minus 3 meters. So if we were going to, I didn't know about Rydberg physics at that time.

Sebastian Hassinger (14:21.985)
Right.

Ivan Deutsch (14:30.602)
I was just thinking, we would excite them to a low-lying excited state. But then we had to have the atoms very close to one another. And in optical lattices, that's possible. But it's much more difficult to manipulate the atoms at the individual level there. The Rydberg state idea came followed on. It was a follow-on paper.

Sebastian Hassinger (14:37.794)
Right, yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger (14:49.208)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (14:57.558)
And I don't think they fully appreciated the power of it. know. So one of the co-authors of that original paper is my friend from this, Steve Ralston, who said, yeah, we just wanted to make the whole thing faster. And if you're less bound, you have a much stronger interaction. the original paper was called Fast Quantum Gates.

The true power of the Rydberg blockade wasn't appreciated, but it then became the thing. One of the ideas, though, that was amazing that has really panned out about the neutral atoms was the ability to be able to move in parallel large groups of atoms together. And that

Sebastian Hassinger (15:49.774)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (15:51.329)
was an architecture we envisioned in the very first paper as a way of doing logical qubits in a way that you have a whole set of physical qubits that can talk to one another in a parallel way. that really panned out in the current, you know, there's, for example, this new company or Atomics.

Sebastian Hassinger (16:00.77)
Right.

Sebastian Hassinger (16:09.518)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (16:20.32)
out of Caltech where they really have published a paper on their roadmap where they really emphasize this and also other companies, course, Quirra, Atom Computing, Inflection, others, where this ability to move atoms in parallel and bring them together in parallel. So a lot of the ideas were, I think, in the first paper. What we didn't have in the first paper was

Sebastian Hassinger (16:20.322)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (16:37.676)
Yeah.

Ivan Deutsch (16:50.486)
the power of the Rydberg level.

Sebastian Hassinger (16:52.46)
Right. Yeah. I find that that plasticity is so exciting in that vacuum chamber. As you said, you can pack neutral atoms in, you might get a million in one lattice potentially, and then you can rearrange them in space in all kinds of ways that seem to me to be almost like a magical ability to try different architecture, architectural patterns and

implementations of error codes in all kinds of ways. So the incredible role in setting the foundation for neutral items as quantum information devices or instruments. But I want to get to something that you're also known for, which is somewhat of a heterodox approach to using neutral atoms. People who are sort of learning about quantum computing may be familiar with

Qbits as two level systems that where one level they're easily distinguishable, they're easily controllable one from another, but you're actually advocating for something you call Qdits. So what is a Qdit with a D?

Ivan Deutsch (18:05.56)
Right. you know, it's well, we can also think about cube about classical bits. You know, we we we compute base two. We have, you know, zeros and ones, and we have two state systems, true or false, and binary logic as the way in which our whole digital information infrastructure works.

And it's natural to port that over to the quantum world where we instead of think about a bit, we have a quantum bit, the qubit. And we have two energy levels or orthogonal levels of our quantum state, zero and one. And that encodes our quantum information. But in principle, both in classical and quantum computing, we can have a different base. We can have base three and sometimes called a trit.

And we can have a Q-trit or a D-level system where D is anything we like bigger than two, we typically call a Q-dit. Now, I don't think it's a slam dunk. don't feel I don't want to be an evangelist because I don't really haven't studied this well enough to be able to say, we really should do quantum computation base 10.

rather than base two or base three or what have you. But I think it's an important question and a lot of groups are now taking this up. Are individual atoms or transmons and superconducting or even photons? We can in principle, each one of them doesn't have to just encode two outcomes. It could encode D outcomes, D being

whatever we might be able to get our hands on. Now, it's true we'd get more information density, but it's not a huge increase. I mean, it's a logarithmic increase. D to the power n versus 2 to the power n has log D over log 2 more information in it. So it's not that huge. And there's

Sebastian Hassinger (20:19.566)
right.

Ivan Deutsch (20:25.171)
Also the challenge, have to be able to now control not just a rotation on a two-level system, but a D-level kind of rotation. And we need to entangle these things differently. And we need to read them out. We need to be able to distinguish not just yes or no, zero or one, but one, two, or three, zero, one, two, or four. And that's

Sebastian Hassinger (20:29.976)
Hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (20:44.27)
Hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (20:51.96)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (20:54.505)
experimentally potentially a lot more challenging. However, what I think is the most important question is fault tolerance. So a quantum computer is, in my view, not going to do anything that is really powerful, something that we couldn't do efficiently on a classical supercomputer.

unless we have a fault tolerant architecture, something that can error correct and do so in a way that corrects errors faster than we're making them. And it's not clear whether we can have a better threshold and a better architecture if we use Qdits. People have studied this for years.

I mean, in the original, know, Daniel Gottesman famously invented the stabilizer formalism for that is the basis of much of our understanding of fault tolerant quantum error correction. Generally did Q-dits in his first in his thesis in his paper, you know, based it was known, but and people have in fits and starts looked at Q-dits, but I think. I think it's like everything

Sebastian Hassinger (22:12.142)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (22:23.679)
until we have, I think the co-design aspect is important. There's theory and fundamental work, but there's also experiments. And sometimes when we see what the capability of what can be done in the lab is, we opens the door to new possibilities of what we might be able to do. And so, you know, years ago, again, with Paul Yesen,

Sebastian Hassinger (22:29.816)
Right.

Ivan Deutsch (22:52.279)
We worked on, we didn't call them qudits at the time. We called them large spin systems. And we developed the ways in which we can operate on and do arbitrary gates on 16 dimensional qudits in cesium atoms. And this was work done about a decade ago now by Pohl and before. And these were not done

Sebastian Hassinger (22:57.869)
Hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (23:10.446)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (23:21.633)
They were done in the ensemble. They weren't done in individually trapped atoms, and we were not entangling them at the time. But the tools that we developed then are now ones that are being applied. And I think we're working on this now in new experiments with my colleagues at Los Alamos, led by Mike Martin, working on individually trapped strontium atoms, which have nuclear spins that are 10 levels.

Sebastian Hassinger (23:50.125)
Right.

Ivan Deutsch (23:50.679)
And so we call them Q decimals and the ways in which we can do arbitrary 10 dimensional rotations and how we can entangle them. And I think there's a lot of work to be done there. Even if we ultimately end up doing qubit based quantum computing, I think

Sebastian Hassinger (23:53.816)
Got it.

Sebastian Hassinger (24:15.786)
Right. Right.

Ivan Deutsch (24:18.358)
these additional levels are ways, for example, where we might be able to efficiently encode a qubit in a qubit and be able to have error correction in a way that is resource efficient. So those are some of the directions.

Sebastian Hassinger (24:28.013)
Right.

Sebastian Hassinger (24:35.468)
Right. Is that, I read something about that. mean, by the way, I think it's phenomenal. One of the earliest thoughts I had when I was encountering quantum computing is we're still doing binary. How do we know that binary logic is the correct approach in this totally new paradigm of quantum computing? So I've always been really, really happy that people like yourself are probing those assumptions and testing.

You know, what, what don't we know that we don't know? so I think there's incredible value in that, but, but I'm really intrigued by the idea of using the, the upper levels, so to speak as means of, of encoding of essentially instantiating error codes inside, like almost in the interior of the construction of the qubit. Is that equivalent in any ways to things like cat qubits or dual rail qubits? Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Ivan Deutsch (25:05.6)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Ivan Deutsch (25:28.498)
absolutely. Right on target. Right on target, Sebastian. Yeah. So in fact, we were inspired. you know, the so-called cat codes that are used in so-called bosonic encodings, like in a microwave cavity, in a superconducting control or in optical systems, you're using the multiple levels associated with the so-called Fox space to

have the redundancy that's necessary for error correction rather than multiple copies. And similarly, we can use the multiple energy levels within, I say, a single atom to have the redundancy we need. And in fact, we wrote a paper really led by my colleague, Milad Marvian, who's an expert in quantum error correction, my students, Shiva Prasad Omanakutan, and others.

We wrote a paper about spin cat codes. these are very much inspired by the kind of bosonic cats and using the multiplicity of levels to encode a qubit. But I want to come back to this point of code design. So the codes are designed in a way that they

deal with the most important physical errors that occur in the atom. And the codes are designed in such a way to not say, well, the error is just arbitrary. We don't know what it's going to be. But in almost any physical system, some errors are more likely than others. And how you use that prior information

to create what's called a biased error correcting code. This is an idea that's old. We are borrowing it from people like John Preskill and others, Ferris, who've looked at this and the group at Yale. And so I think that's, again, another important aspect. I think the acceleration in quantum error correction has come because the

Ivan Deutsch (27:50.793)
experimental platforms have gotten so good that we can put certain things to the test. And then we say, you know what? There's this feature that happens. So for example, there's this whole story about leakage and an erasure whereby population leaks out of the qubit subspace into other levels. And if we can know that that happened, that's actually a very powerful error correct.

tool and many architectures are now building their architecture. We want erasures rather than bit flips or phase flips. So I think the thing of working together, my career by accident, not because I chose it this way, but it was because of the opportunities that just were available to me, were ones where I worked at the interface between theory and experiment.

Sebastian Hassinger (28:20.973)
Hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (28:28.024)
Hmm.

Sebastian Hassinger (28:47.31)
Mm.

Ivan Deutsch (28:49.588)
And that has informed my thinking so deeply about theory. And I think, yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger (28:54.53)
Well, Ivan, also in the interface between trapped ions and neutral atoms as well. So even between modalities and also between university and national lab, and also even more recently between public sector and private sector in your role in elevate quantum. So I mean, I feel like you're constantly in the interfaces.

Ivan Deutsch (29:20.638)
Yeah, it's true at those interfaces. It's sort of interdisciplinary, I think. Bring together all those different modalities of thought, modalities of work, modalities of platform. Their creation can happen there.

Sebastian Hassinger (29:40.238)
Yeah, that's great. And I mean, I want to make sure that we touch on elevate quantum because you mentioned squint and you also in addition to sort of getting that convening going and which has been going for 25 years, as you said, you're the founding director of the Quantum New Mexico Institute, which is really sort of the part of the bootstrapping of elevate quantum, which is the only

quantum focused tech hub, EDA tech hub in the country, I believe. It's an incredible sort of leapfrogging from where New Mexico was just a few years ago in terms of the supply chain, the industrial development or industrialization. Is that something that, mean, obviously, as you said, you're comfortable in the interfaces, you find ways to create and add value there.

Was there a particular sort of motivation from an economic development perspective or a workforce development and industrial development perspective that drew you to that?

Ivan Deutsch (30:48.885)
Yeah, so let me just say a couple of things. in 2018 or so, Carl Caves retired, and I stepped in as the director of the Center for Quantum Information and Control, CQUIC, which has been our longstanding center here at the University of New Mexico. And when I became the director, that was just on the

beginnings of the development of the National Quantum Initiative, the NQI, which was passed in 2019 and December 2019. And at that time, it was clear to me also seeing what was going on in the private sector with the likes of Google and IBM and the startups that were beginning to really take shape, that this industrial wave was coming. And

I felt that it was important. New Mexico, as we discussed in the beginning of our conversation, I'm so proud of our track record. All of the students and postdocs that have come out and are the leaders around the world right now, that New Mexico in particular would not be left behind in terms of the benefits of the economic development. New Mexico

is a very poor state in the nation and there's been a lot of innovation here, but it hasn't really capitalized on it for its people. So that's one aspect. The other thing is I just feel it's a new, I'm an ivory tower guy. been, I'm in 53rd grade or something, I don't know. And I've never left, but our field now is not.

isolated from industry. And I thought it was also important that for our academic and R &D that there was an industrial component to the activities in New Mexico. So I strongly advocated for that. And one of the ways we did that was to join forces with our friends and neighbors in Colorado.

Ivan Deutsch (33:10.239)
where we have long time collaborations, particularly with CU Boulder and NIST in Boulder. And it was through that that we formed this consortium that became Elevate Quantum, led by Zach Yushalami, who just stepped down. There'll be a new leader there. But in any event, so the regional tech hub was a way in which

Colorado already had a kind of growing and vibrant private sector. New Mexico really didn't. And we won the Economic Development Agency Tech Hub Award that you alluded to. And that got the attention of the state of New Mexico. And together with what was going on internally to UNM,

Sebastian Hassinger (34:02.05)
Mm-hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (34:07.31)
We established the Quantum New Mexico Institute, the QNMI, which is a university-wide center institute here at UNM. It involves the School of Engineering, Arts and Sciences, the Business School, all different elements of the university to really build this interdisciplinary activity, as well as a joint institute between

UNM, Sandia National Labs in Los Alamos, bringing together those assets. And that is real. We're proud of that. It's a real powerhouse. I'm happy to have established it. And Bob Ledoux is a professor here in physics and astronomy who is now the director of the Queen Amai. And he's really leading the effort going forward.

really focusing my efforts really in my research. But I'm continuing, of course, in this.

Sebastian Hassinger (35:11.67)
Yeah. I was going to say, I think people like yourself who can navigate those interfaces and bridge those interdisciplinary components tend to be dragged into administrative and leadership roles because it's rare, right? It's hard to do that. So I'm glad to hear, I know your heart is really on the hard science and the research side. So I'm glad to hear your sort of...

clawing back some of your time to get back to the science because I hear from everybody on the administrative side that it can absolutely swamp your ability to do real science. Yeah.

Ivan Deutsch (35:48.405)
Yeah, it's an important job. I think, you know, I'm very glad we have a very excellent director here now who's 100 % devoted to this activity. And I think it's really, you know, this has now attracted, there's a number of companies who are establishing presence here. Continuum, one of the leading iron traps.

companies opened a new facility here in Albuquerque. Queerop is announced their opening. There's a big venture studio that's supported by the state that they're establishing. QNECT is a quantum communications and networking company. They're building a quantum network here in Albuquerque and there are others. And so

I think that ecosystem is really accelerating now. And I also want to thank the leadership of the state and the city of Albuquerque, who really have, see the potential for this. there's big investments that are being made now in the state and in the city of Albuquerque and elsewhere. So I think New Mexico, well, as I like to say,

New Mexico is a quantum state.

Sebastian Hassinger (37:18.202)
It's quite the journey too from being interested in quantum foundations leading you into curiosity about quantum information and its role in understanding foundations all the way to developing an industrial ecosystem around quantum technologies. That's quite the journey. is the next sort of step in your research to continue to work on

Ivan Deutsch (37:34.771)
in my wildest dream.

Sebastian Hassinger (37:45.454)
on the Q decimal sort of approach to, yeah.

Ivan Deutsch (37:49.23)
Yeah, that's one component of what I work on. think I'm generally still, I mean, I'm interested in foundations. I work on questions about quantum complexity and where does quantum advantage lie and the role of noise in limiting complexity. That's a big area of interest to me. I'm also working with colleagues at Sandia on building

Sebastian Hassinger (38:05.23)
Hmm.

Ivan Deutsch (38:18.069)
the better components for neutral atom quantum computers, even in the qubit-based way. And I may be thinking about collaborating with some of the industrial partners as well. We'll see how that goes. But at the end of it, my heart is with my students, whether it be in the classroom or in our

supervision of research. That's where I feel I have really the most to offer.

Sebastian Hassinger (38:54.51)
That's fantastic, Ivan. If you do end up partnering with any industrial entities, they'll be very, very lucky to get you. And I know your students are already very lucky to have you. So I thank you very much for your time. I'm really, really happy we finally got this conversation together. And it's been fascinating. Thank you.

Ivan Deutsch (39:04.935)
I appreciate that.

Ivan Deutsch (39:12.487)
Thank you so much for having me. It was a great pleasure, Sebastian. Be well. Bye-bye.

Sebastian Hassinger (39:17.422)
Thank you. All right.