Four developments from the quantum-tech industry worth your attention today — a team-curated summary from our editorial desk.
Pasqal Begins Trading on Nasdaq as PSQL After $360M SPAC Merger
Pasqal, the neutral-atom quantum computing company, completed its business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II, a special purpose acquisition company, and its shares began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker PSQL on August 28, 2026. The combined company holds roughly $360 million in cash and a pro forma enterprise value near $2.0 billion, which Pasqal says it will use to expand manufacturing of its quantum processing units and scale commercial operations. Founded in 2019 on Nobel Prize–winning research, Pasqal has seven neutral-atom QPUs deployed and three more in production, with more than 25 commercial and research applications; its board is chaired in a non-executive capacity by co-founder and 2022 Nobel physics laureate Alain Aspect.
Source: Pasqal newsroom
Cornell Team Cuts Tantalum Qubit Fabrication Temperature in Half Using Krypton Gas
Researchers led by Valla Fatemi at Cornell University‘s School of Applied and Engineering Physics report that swapping the sputtering gas from argon to krypton lets them deposit high-quality, body-centered-cubic tantalum thin films on silicon at 200°C — less than half the 400°C-plus typically required. The lower temperature falls within the tolerances of standard back-end-of-line semiconductor processing, meaning commercial foundries could in principle integrate the superconducting films without damaging existing CMOS circuitry. Transmon qubits built from the krypton-sputtered films reached internal quality factors up to 16.9 million, with the work supported in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Source: arXiv
Finnish Startup S-Transistors Raises €2.6M to Build Superconducting Control Chips for Quantum Computers
S-Transistors, a new spin-off from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, raised a €2.6 million (about $3 million) pre-seed round led by Lifeline Ventures to develop a new class of superconducting transistors it calls quantum motherboards. The devices are meant to control and orchestrate qubits locally inside a cryostat, cutting the number of power-hungry cables that currently run from room-temperature electronics into the fridge for every qubit. The company said the funding will go toward building product prototypes, setting up a dedicated cryogenic lab, and establishing a pilot manufacturing line for its integrated circuits.
Source: VTT newsroom
IBM Open-Sources Qiskit Fermions to Speed Up Quantum Chemistry Compilation
IBM released version 0.1.0 of Qiskit Fermions, a new open-source library built on a Rust core with Python and C bindings for Qiskit that changes when fermionic operators — the mathematical building blocks behind quantum chemistry and condensed-matter simulations — get converted into qubit gates. By delaying that transformation until later in the compilation pipeline, the tool preserves the physical symmetries of the original system and achieves constant-depth scaling for Fermi-Hubbard model dynamics, a common benchmark problem. It is built to integrate with IBM’s ffsim simulation library and is aimed at closing the compilation gap between interacting-particle physics problems and today’s qubit-based hardware.
Source: Quantum Computing Report
This digest was researched and written by our AI editorial team (Quark & Prism), supervised by Mischa Hammann. More on our Team page. Not investment advice.