The Quantum Chandelier

Photo MIT Technology Review

You've probably seen a photo like this - a tower of gold-plated discs wrapped in loops of wire, narrowing toward a point at the bottom. Google, IBM, and most quantum computing press releases use some version of this image. People call the assembly the chandelier, and it looks like the computer. It isn't. It's the life support system for a chip you can't even see in the photo.

Start with what's actually inside a quantum computer. A qubit is a physical device, usually a tiny loop of superconducting metal, that can hold a mix of two states at once instead of a single 0 or 1. That mixed state is fragile. A stray photon, a vibration, or a few millikelvin of extra heat can collapse it before you get a useful calculation out of it. Physicists call that collapse decoherence, and it's the central engineering problem in the entire field. Keeping decoherence at bay is the whole reason the chandelier exists.

Why It Has to Be That Cold

At room temperature, everything around a chip is radiating heat as stray photons, trillions of them, bouncing around and hitting anything nearby. For a normal computer chip that's irrelevant. For a superconducting qubit it's fatal, since a single one of those stray photons carries enough energy to flip the qubit's state. Cooling the chip down to the mixing chamber stage, near 10 millikelvin starves the environment of those stray photons and also lets the qubit's own wiring become superconducting, meaning it carries current with zero electrical resistance. Both effects are required. Without one or the other, the qubit decoheres in nanoseconds instead of the few hundred microseconds researchers need.

The Five Stages

The gold structure is a dilution refrigerator, built from stacked stages that grow colder toward the bottom. A pulse tube cryocooler, essentially a specialized mechanical compressor, does the first heavy lifting, dropping the system from room temperature to about 40 Kelvin and then 4 Kelvin using compressed helium gas. Below that, the fridge switches to a different method. A chamber called the still boils off helium-3 to reach roughly 0.7 Kelvin, and a series of heat exchangers pushes the temperature down further, through about 0.1 Kelvin, to the mixing chamber at the very bottom. A mixture of helium-3 and helium-4 drives that last stage. The full cooldown from room temperature to base takes 24 to 48 hours, and it has to happen every time the system needs to be opened for maintenance.

Each gold disc in the photo is one of these stages, plated in gold because gold conducts heat well, resists corrosion, and doesn't interfere magnetically with the qubits. Each stage nests inside the next, shielding the colder one below it from the warmer one above.

Figure: the chandelier's cooling stages, colored from gold at the warmest to blue at the coldest, with the qubit chip mounted at the base.

The Wiring Problem

Every wire running through those stages carries control signals down to the qubits and readout signals back up to room-temperature electronics. A signal heading down gets attenuated at each stage on the way, stripping out electrical noise picked up from the warmer stages above. A signal heading up gets amplified, since the qubit's own readout signal is too faint to detect at room temperature. Every one of those wires is also a heat leak. Heat travels down a wire just as easily as a signal does, and the cooling power at the base stage is measured in microwatts, barely enough to warm a fraction of a grain of rice. A single wire that's improperly thermalized can add more heat than the entire fridge can remove.

That tradeoff is why wiring, not the qubits themselves, has become one of the field's biggest scaling obstacles. Each qubit needs its own set of control and readout lines, so the number of cables required grows directly with qubit count, eventually exceeding what a single cryostat can physically hold. Labs are now racing to move some control electronics inside the fridge itself, onto chips that can survive the cold, so fewer wires have to cross from room temperature down to the millikelvin stage. A single dilution refrigerator system runs one to five million dollars, and most of that cost is solving this wiring problem.

What's Actually Quantum

The qubit chip itself sits at the very bottom, bolted to the mixing chamber, a few millimeters across. It's small enough to miss in most photos of the chandelier, which is the point. Everything above it, every gold disc, every coil of coax, every attenuator and amplifier, exists for one reason: to keep that small chip cold and quiet enough to hold a quantum state long enough to be useful. Chapter 3 of Quantum from the Ground Up makes this argument directly: physics works, engineering makes it work. The chandelier is that argument built out of gold-plated copper and helium-3.

Next time a chandelier photo turns up in your feed, look past the wiring for the small chip at the bottom. That chip is the entire quantum computer. Everything else in the picture is plumbing.

This post will fold into the next edition of Quantum from the Ground Up, out September 1.

The Second June 22, 2026 Quantum Executive Order

In a post Tuesday, I covered the executive order setting hard federal deadlines for post-quantum cryptography migration: key establishment by 2030, digital signatures by 2031. That order dealt with defense. On the same day, June 22, the president signed a second order that deals with offense.

Executive Order 14413, "Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation," directs the federal government to build a large-scale quantum computer for scientific use. The centerpiece is the Quantum Computer for Application Development and Discovery Science effort, called QC-ADDS. The order directs the Department of Energy to deliver at least one QC-ADDS system to a DOE facility and make it available to the scientific community.

Here's some details - within 90 days, DOE must publish the technical specifications required for QC-ADDS to perform transformative scientific applications beyond current classical computer capabilities. Within 180 days, DOE must explore private-sector partnership models and report on cost, scope, and delivery timeframe. DOE has already responded: its Quantum Genesis initiative targets a fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computing capability by 2028, with a National Quantum Supercomputing User Facility to give U.S. researchers access to systems across multiple qubit modalities.

The Commerce Department must develop a plan for advance market commitments to pull in commercial quantum vendors. The Defense Department gets its own track, establishing programs for national security applications of quantum computing, potentially including a dedicated center. The order also establishes a national center for quantum performance assessment and directs a government-wide quantum workforce recruitment strategy, including special pay rates and retention incentives.

The workforce section carries the most direct relevance for technical education programs. The order tasks NSF to stand up a network of National QIST Workforce Development Institutes within 180 days. Federal money for hands-on QIST training will flow somewhere; the question is where.

There is a thread connecting both orders. The PQC migration order sets a deadline for protecting existing systems. EO 14413 sets a timeline for building the systems that will eventually make those protections necessary. Both orders treat 2030 as the planning horizon. Harvard's Mikhail Lukin put fault-tolerant, large-scale quantum computers at end-of-decade in a recent assessment, five to ten years ahead of earlier estimates.

Inside the ST54M: One Chip, Three Jobs, and a Post-Quantum Upgrade

Yesterday I wrote about our government setting a new deadline for quantum-safe encryption. At the end of the post I briefly mentioned STMicroelectronics introduced the ST54M, the first mobile chip with a dedicated hardware accelerator for post-quantum algorithms. I got a question from a reader – what the heck does that mean....?!  Fair question! Here’s some detail on what that chip does, and how it works. If you use your phone for payments – this is a very good thing.

Tap your phone against a payment terminal and several things have to happen in well under a second. The device has to prove its identity, encrypt the exchange, and complete the transaction before you lift your hand away. Most people never think about the chip doing that work. STMicroelectronics just gave that chip a significant upgrade.

The new chip is called the ST54M. It is a single chip that combines three functions that used to live on separate pieces of silicon: an NFC controller, a secure element, and eSIM support. NFC is the short range radio that lets your phone talk to a payment terminal, a transit gate, or a hotel door lock. The secure element is a locked vault inside the chip that holds your credentials and keys. eSIM is the embedded SIM that lets your carrier profile live in the device itself instead of a removable card. Folding all three into one die (small piece of silicon that contains the electronic circuits needed) simplifies the phone and tightens the security boundary between them.

The bigger story is what ST54M adds on top: a hardware accelerator built for post-quantum cryptography. Today's encryption relies on math problems that are hard for ordinary computers to solve. A sufficiently capable quantum computer could solve some of those problems quickly, which would undermine the locks protecting your payments and your identity data. ST54M supports two newer algorithms, ML-KEM and ML-DSA, designed to resist that kind of attack. Building the acceleration into hardware means a phone can run this stronger cryptography without slowing down.

STMicroelectronics has samples available now, with production and certification targeted for July 2026. The certifications matter for adoption; payment networks and government identity programs will not deploy a chip until it clears those bars.

None of this changes what happens when you tap your phone tomorrow. It changes what is quietly defending that tap a few years from now.

Government Sets New Deadline for Quantum-Safe Encryption

A student in one of my summer courses asked the question I get every time encryption comes up in discussion: why does this matter now? RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) and ECC (elliptic curve cryptography) have protected data for decades. The quantum computer that breaks them does not exist yet. 

My usual answer leans on Q-Day estimates: Google's Gidney put the threshold at roughly one million physical qubits to break RSA-2048, and an IonQ fidelity result last October pushed the realistic window to somewhere between 2029 and 2033. Most expert estimates before that sat closer to 2035. On June 22, the federal government answered the student's question for me. President Trump signed 

an executive order setting hard deadlines for federal post-quantum cryptography migration (PQC): agencies must move high value assets to post-quantum key establishment by December 31, 2030, and post-quantum digital signatures by December 31, 2031. Federal contractors get the same 2030 deadline for FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) compliance.

That replaces the prior government baseline. Under the Biden administration's National Security Memorandum 10, agencies were planning around 2035. The new order compresses that by four to five years and adds teeth: agencies must name a PQC migration lead within 30 days, the Commerce Department must run a migration pilot by the end of 2027, and contractors face FIPS enforcement through procurement rules. 

Coverage from Cybersecurity Dive notes the order also pushes CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) to publish guidance on cryptographic bills of materials, the inventory work agencies need before they can migrate anything.

How the Industry Responded

Two days after the signing, STMicroelectronics introduced the ST54M, the first mobile chip with a dedicated hardware accelerator for post-quantum algorithms. It runs ML-KEM (Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism) and ML-DSA (Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm), the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) standards finalized in 2024, on a single die alongside NFC (near-field communication), secure element, and eSIM (embedded SIM) functions. Commercial sampling is available now, with certification targeted for July 2026. That is the hardware path the federal order is pushing the rest of industry toward on the same compressed timeline.

I tell students today: nobody knows the exact day a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arrives, but the government just stopped waiting to find out. And.... I would not be surprised at all to see the deadline moved forward again.... soon.

STEM at Two Years: Community College Degrees That Pay

Most of my career has been at the community college. I directed an NSF Center of Excellence at Springfield Technical Community College and taught electronics, computer systems, and photonics there. At Holyoke Community College I still teach engineering transfer courses part time for students heading to four-year universities. Over forty years I have watched students come through two-year STEM programs and go directly into careers that surprised people who assumed a bachelor's degree was required. This post is the third in a series on degree choice and outcomes. The first two covered bachelor's programs and two-year degrees broadly. This one focuses specifically on STEM at the associate degree level: what the programs are, what they pay, and how the job outlook looks in 2026.

The macro case for STEM at any credential level is straightforward. The BLS projects STEM occupations will grow 8.1 percent between 2024 and 2034, nearly triple the 2.7 percent rate for all other occupations. The median salary across STEM occupations sits at $101,600, well above the all-occupation median. The two-year credential does not open every STEM door, but it opens more of them than most people expect, and it does so at a fraction of the cost and time of a four-year path.

The highest-paying two-year STEM programs in 2026, per BLS occupational data: information security analysts (cybersecurity) median at $119,860 with 32 percent projected job growth through 2032; radiation therapy at a median above $100,000; dental hygiene at $94,260; and registered nursing at $93,600. Below those, nuclear technicians median around $84,000, electronics engineering technicians around $67,550, and laser electro-optics technicians in the $55,000 to $65,000 range depending on industry and region. HVAC technology and computer network support round out the middle of the table at $58,000 to $62,000.

A point worth making clearly: the two-year STEM credential typically leads to technician and support roles, not engineering or research positions. That distinction matters for career planning, but it does not diminish the outcomes. An electronics engineering technician working in manufacturing or test and measurement earns $67,550 median with stable demand. A cybersecurity analyst with an associate degree and relevant certifications, CompTIA Security+ in particular, enters a field with 32 percent projected growth and a six-figure median salary. The ceiling in those careers depends more on certification, experience, and specialization than on whether the entry credential was a two-year or four-year degree.

The cost side of this decision matters as much as the salary side. Average annual tuition at a public two-year college runs about $3,990, versus over $11,500 at a public four-year institution. A student completing a two-year cybersecurity or nursing program graduates with little or no debt and enters a field paying $90,000 to $120,000. A student completing a four-year program in the same field earns more in some cases, but starts with average student loan debt above $29,000 and two additional years of foregone income. For STEM technician roles specifically, that math favors the two-year path more consistently than in most other fields.

Before committing to a two-year STEM program, check three things. First, verify that the program carries the right accreditation for your field. Nursing programs must be accredited by ACEN or CCNE for graduates to sit for the NCLEX. Engineering technology programs are credentialed by ABET. Second, check whether the career path requires licensure or certification beyond the degree itself, and build the cost and timeline for those credentials into your plan. Third, look at your specific college's job placement data for that program. National medians are a baseline; local labor market conditions move those numbers significantly in both directions.

One pathway that gets less attention than it deserves: the two-year degree as the first half of a four-year degree, paid for by an employer. Many community college STEM graduates enter the workforce directly, then pursue a bachelor's degree part time while their employer covers tuition. This is not rare. A significant share of working adults completing bachelor's degrees are doing exactly this, particularly in nursing, engineering technology, and information technology. The RN-to-BSN pathway is the most established example: a graduate earns an associate degree, passes the certification, enters the workforce as a registered nurse, and completes a BSN online or part time over two to three years, often with hospital tuition reimbursement covering most of the cost. The same model applies in engineering technology and cybersecurity, where employers in manufacturing, defense, and infrastructure actively fund continuing education. The credential upgrade from technician to technologist, meaning from associate to bachelor's degree, also typically comes with a pay bump and expanded career options. For students weighing cost, this route splits the financial risk: two years of low-cost community college tuition, then employer-subsidized completion of the bachelor's, with income throughout. The total credential is the same four-year degree. The debt load and the timeline are very different.

The community college students I’ve watched who did best in two-year STEM programs were not picking a fallback. They were picking a specific job in a specific field and treating the degree as the direct path to it. That approach still works in 2026. For some, the two-year degree is also the starting point for a four-year degree the employer ends up paying for. The programs are there. The jobs are there. Check the current numbers before you decide. Know the program, know the credential requirements, know the market.

Both Tracks Moving

In 1994 I started writing a textbook called Windows 95 Essentials for an Engineer’s Toolkit. There was one problem: Windows 95 did not exist yet. Microsoft was still building it, and they pushed updates almost weekly. Each one arrived on a new set of over a dozen floppy disks. Every update meant loading those disks, reinstalling from scratch, retesting every procedure, and rewriting any section that no longer matched the software. My second daughter, Gabby was turning four years old. Eva was born in June 1995, right as the book was finishing. I kept writing.

Spring 1995 something else happened that had nothing to do with floppy disks. The internet was being privatized in real time. Through most of the early 1990s, the internet was a government and academic network. The NSFNET backbone carried U.S. research and education traffic at no cost to institutions. Commercial access was limited, and online services like CompuServe and AOL operated as walled gardens: you paid a subscription, you got their content, and the wider internet was largely off the table. Microsoft had built The Microsoft Network on exactly that model, a paid subscription service meant to compete with AOL. Then the walls started coming down. The NSFNET was decommissioned in April 1995, handing the backbone to commercial providers. Commercial ISPs multiplied. The web browser arrived. And Microsoft, watching the same thing everyone else was watching, pivoted almost overnight. Bill Gates’ “Internet Tidal Wave” memo from May 1995 called the internet “the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC.” MSN shifted toward the open web. 

Technically, Internet Explorer (IE) did not ship with the OS on August 24,1995 - IE 1.0 was released a week earlier on August 16,1995 as part of what Microsoft called the Plus! pack.

The book I was writing had to reflect a platform that was no longer just a desktop operating system; it was suddenly a node on a network becoming public infrastructure. That meant more rewrites. It also meant the book was documenting something larger than a software release.

The book took nearly a year to complete. The only way through it was parallel progress. I could not wait for the software to stabilize before writing, and I could not wait for the writing to be done before testing. Both tracks ran at the same time, and I updated whichever one had fallen behind. That is not a comfortable way to work. It is, however, the only way to finish something when the target keeps moving.

Working under moving targets is a skill. Most engineering projects involve some version of it: a component spec changes mid-build, a client requirement shifts after the design review, a test result forces a redesign two weeks before the deadline. The teams that handle this well are not the ones with the most complete plans. They are the ones who keep both tracks moving and update each one as new information arrives.

Three practical habits help. First, document as you go rather than saving it for the end; late-stage documentation of early decisions is mostly reconstruction from memory. Second, treat a changing spec as new information, not a setback; the project is not broken, it has just been updated. Third, keep the physical work and the written work in sync; a prototype that is ahead of its documentation, or documentation that describes a prototype that does not exist yet, creates debt that compounds.

The floppy disks eventually stopped coming. The book shipped. Eva was born healthy. Windows 95 launched on August 24, 1995, with a Rolling Stones song and more press coverage than any software release before it. The 31st anniversary is two months away. Not a round number, but the lessons from that year still hold: keep both tracks moving, treat every spec change as information, and do not wait for conditions to settle before making progress. The target never stops moving.

Pick a Major With Your Eyes Open: Employment Odds and Starting Pay by Field

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. - Neils Bohr

My post yesterday - Engineering Jobs, Class of 2026 and Beyond - sparked some questions. Students (class of 2026 high school and those in college that are early in a major selection) along with some anxious parents want to know not just how engineering was doing, but how other fields compared. So here are the actual numbers, by major, before you or your student commits four years and a tuition bill to a course of study. But.... before we get into it the data in this post will age. Check it before you choose and keep tracking it.

Two numbers matter when you pick a major: whether you can get a job at all, and whether that job actually requires your degree. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York tracks both for recent graduates. In early 2026, the overall unemployment rate for new college graduates sat at 5.7 percent. More telling is the underemployment rate, the share working in jobs that do not require a college degree: 41.5 percent. That means nearly four in ten new graduates are serving coffee or managing a retail floor regardless of what their diploma says. The gap between majors on this metric is enormous.

Criminal justice majors face a 67.2 percent underemployment rate. Performing arts is 63.2 percent. General business, the catch-all major, runs 52.8 percent, far higher than accounting at 17.9 percent or business analytics at 27.2 percent. On the other end, nursing sits at 9.7 percent underemployment and computer science at 16.5 percent, per St. Louis Fed data. Computer science unemployment in 2025 ran about 6 to 7 percent, higher than average, but underemployment was low: if you landed a job, it was likely a real one in the field. Unemployment and underemployment pull in opposite directions for some majors; you need both numbers.

On the salary side, NACE's Winter 2026 Salary Survey projects these starting averages for bachelor's graduates: computer sciences at $81,535, engineering at $81,198, math and sciences at $74,184, and business at $68,873. Social sciences are the only category where projected salaries dropped, down 1.7 percent from last year. The gap between the top and bottom is real: computer science and engineering graduates start about $35,000 to $40,000 ahead of education, fine arts, and sociology majors, who typically open around $42,000 to $48,000.

Salary rankings and employment odds do not always point the same direction. A college senior in May 2026 expected to earn roughly $80,000 one year out, according to a Clever survey. The actual median starting salary was closer to $60,000. The inflation in expectations is not random: students hear the computer science headline number and generalize. STEM majors do earn more, on average. But within STEM the spread is wide, and geography compresses those national averages fast. A business administration grad taking a first job in a smaller market should expect something closer to the lower end of the employer band, not the $68,873 national average.

Before committing to a major, look up three things. Check the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for what similar roles pay in your actual market, not the national average. Ask your college career services office for its own first-destination data: school-specific placement rates beat any national survey for your situation. And check the New York Fed's outcomes-by-major table directly. 

Every graduating class generates the same mix of relief and dread, usually with the same absence of specifics. The numbers above will not guarantee anything, but they put the decision on better footing. Four years is a long time. So is forty years of a career built on a choice made without doing a little research.

Bohr is right about the future. Things are changing very fast. Keep running the numbers.