What is a qubit, really? Not a tiny ball. Not a 0 or 1 waiting to be read. It's an arrow on a sphere — two angles fix it completely. Every noise process you meet later is a story about that arrow.

If you want to try Quantum Metal without installing anything, you can now — 90+ tutorials have a Colab and Binder button, so you click one and you're designing a chip in a live notebook. Mostly there to help students and newcomers get started.

Sometimes the qubit is right and the measurement lies. A |1⟩ gets read as 0, a |0⟩ as 1 — so the probability you measure is biased toward the middle. The good news: readout error is measurable, and you can correct much of it back out.

When you first ran a circuit on real quantum hardware, what surprised you? Which noise source hit you first — and which took longest to actually understand? I'll compile the replies and share them back.

A tiny gate error is a big deal because it's coherent — it adds up. Rotate a qubit 3° too far on every X gate. Invisible once. But after ~30 gates it's a 90° error, and by ~60 the answer has fully flipped. The circuit is now confidently wrong.

A quantum computer doesn't give you a probability — it gives you a coin. One run, one bit. To learn the probability you average many shots, and that estimate has spread: sampling noise. Want half the spread? Run 4× as many (it shrinks like 1/√N).

Before you can simulate a quantum chip, you first turn it into a mesh — a scaffolding of little tetrahedra the fields get solved on. Nice thing about the open tooling: it renders straight to Gmsh, so an open-source design can go the whole way to an open-source solve.

Teaching an intro to circuit QED at the Quantum Device Workshop reminded me: explaining the fundamentals forces you to actually understand them again. You can't hand-wave in front of people seeing it for the first time.

Someone in the community asked if Quantum Metal could add a SNAIL — three Josephson junctions on one arm, one on the other, the element behind Kerr-free parametric amplifiers and three-wave mixers. The maintainers built it. Physics from Frattini, Sivak, Devoret.

Half of laying out a superconducting chip is really just routing — every line reaching its target at the right length without crossing another. Tedious by hand. Nice that the open tooling can take some of it off your plate: meanders for length, mixed routes to thread through.

One reason a quantum computer doesn't do what the math says: ask it to flip a qubit and the real pulse rotates a hair over or under 180°. Barely visible once — but across a long circuit those consistent misses pile into a wrong answer. That's coherent noise.

For a while the community had been asking Quantum Metal for airbridges — small crossovers that hop over a CPW to tie the ground plane together and quiet the slotline modes that spoil a qubit. They're in there now, thanks to Clark Miyamoto and the QDC maintainers who built it.

It was a pleasure to meet Stephen M. R. Covey, who visited Google to speak about trust. His point stuck: trust isn't a soft virtue, it's economic. Low trust slows everything down. Almost no research runs on enforcement — it runs on belief. Where has trust changed your speed?

Everyone in this photo works on superconducting qubits—except the bear, who remains stubbornly classical. Great to catch up with the legends Andreas Wallraff (ETH Zurich) and Mollie Schwartz (MIT Lincoln Laboratory) at the UCLA Quantum Device Workshop.

I'm posting my slides from "Introduction to Circuit #Quantum Electrodynamics (cQED)," my opening talk at the Quantum Device Workshop.

Buckle up — tomorrow at QDW 2026 I'm giving an intro to circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED): the physics under every superconducting qubit. The talk I wish someone had given me when I started. Slides to follow.

A great part of a conference isn’t on the schedule. #QEC 2026 brought the bulk of the error-correction community to Santa Barbara this week, and to lunch tables like this one. Good company under the bright sun here: Earl Campbell, Craig Gidney, Jamie Gill, and others.

Day 1 of #QEC 2026 in Santa Barbara. Full room for Yue Wu’s invited talk this morning. A few hundred people who’ve started recently or spent years on quantum error correction, together in one room for a week. If you’re at QEC, say hi.

In Santa Barbara for #QEC 2026 — the 8th quantum error correction meeting. A week with the people working out how to make qubits survive long enough to compute what is otherwise uncomputable.

How do you actually go from a chip layout to a working superconducting qubit? That's the whole point of the Quantum Device Workshop — back at UCLA, June 15–18. Four days, fully hands-on. I'll be teaching. 🚀

Entanglement is stronger after good food. Great evening with colleagues, collaborators, and a few new folks joining the Google #Quantum #AI community. Thanks to Pedram Roushan for bringing everyone together.

Good food, good company, and a few #quantum ideas in superposition.

What a time to be involved in the quantum device community! At the APS Global Physics Summit, old friends and new faces gathered for lunch, a small moment that captures something important: building quantum technology is hard, and doing it together is what makes it possible.

Another highlight from last week, Swarnadeep Majumdar presenting work on QuEPP (Quantum Enhanced Pauli Propagation), our new take on the classical-quantum combination for error mitigation: arxiv.org/abs/2603.14485

One humbling aspect of science is discovering that your work has touched someone else's life in ways you never anticipated. At the APS Global Physics Summit last week, I had the privilege of meeting several young researchers who shared how my lectures and research had inspired them.

Few things recharge you like sitting down with the people you've shared this science journey with, wherever that road has taken each of us.

There’s no one to take a selfie with like the one and only Andreas Wallraff and Dave Schuster! Glad to continue our now many year tradition of taking a selfie aps every year. #apssummit26 #quantum

Sharing a snapshot from my second talk at #APSSummit26 — this one on NMR OTOCs and Pauli‑path approaches to zero‑noise extrapolation (ZNE) to learn an inter-atomic distance of 2.44 +- 0.04 angstroms on a Google's Willow quantum processor.

Thank you to everyone who packed the room this morning at #APSSummit26 for my 30 min talk on our machine learning for practical quantum error mitigation (Nature Machine Intelligence) work.

Welcome to American Physical Society Global #physics Summit in Denver! Just watch out for the big bear and the snow. I’ll see you tomorrow at 9 AM for my 30 minute talk on machine learning for error mitigation, and Tuesday afternoon for our NMR OTOC work #APSSummit26 #quantum