About
Updated 20 September 2026
Stark Quantum is written by Christian Stark. It is a small independent project: one person reading primary sources and writing down what they actually say. There is no newsroom behind it, no vendor paying for it, and nothing on the site for sale.
The tagline is quantum, without the press release. That is the whole editorial position.
Who writes this
Christian Stark, in Aachen, Germany.
An independent researcher, with no affiliation to any vendor or institution. The work is unpaid and the site is non-commercial.
The subject is future technologies: examining them, and writing from primary sources. Quantum computing is the part of that subject this site covers.
What that does not make me. I am not a lab, not a vendor, and not a consultant. I do not present other people’s experiments as my own results: everything measured here was measured by someone else, and the citation says who.
Contact: info@starkquantum.com
What this site is trying to do
Quantum computing produces an unusual amount of noise per unit of result. A laboratory posts a preprint with a careful set of caveats; a week later the same experiment is described in public as a machine that will break encryption. Somewhere between those two descriptions the useful information disappears.
The work here is narrow: read the primary source, separate the claim from the evidence, and write down what is still missing. That is it. Three sentences recur often enough that they may as well be stated up front.
- A demo is not a machine.
- A physical qubit is not a logical qubit.
- A press release is not evidence.
None of those are cynical. They are the difference between a result that is real and a result that is finished, and that difference is where nearly every misreading of this field begins.
Why the gap between a demo and a machine is worth tracking
A demonstration proves that something can happen once, under conditions the experimenters chose, with the errors either post-selected away or absorbed by classical processing afterwards. A machine is something you can hand to somebody who did not build it, who then gets a correct answer to a problem they picked, without knowing the answer in advance.
The distance between those two things is not a matter of scaling up. It runs through error correction, and error correction has its own thresholds, overheads, and failure modes. A processor with a thousand physical qubits and no working error correction is not a thousandth of the way to a useful machine. It may be a long way from the road entirely.
That gap is the subject of this site. Watching it is more informative than watching qubit counts, because the count is the number a company can most easily make go up.
What is here
- Essays. Longer pieces in four categories: Foundations, Hardware and error, Tooling, and Applications and limits. Each one ends with the same four lines — the claim, the evidence, the missing piece, and why it matters. Foundation essays are living documents; they carry a reviewed date separate from the date they were first published.
- Briefs. Two to four sentences tied to a primary source, published only when a result carries a number worth reading. Four to six in a week is a busy week. Empty weeks are common and are not a failure, and the archive stays empty rather than carrying placeholders.
- The Reality Board. Four questions about whether this field has arrived, with the honest answer to each and a written condition for changing it.
- A glossary. Working definitions aimed at reading announcements rather than at passing an exam.
- A sources page. The complete allowlist this site reads from, and the categories it refuses on principle.
The publication language is English, and only English. The Impressum and the privacy notice carry German because German law requires it. Nothing else is translated, and there is no plan to translate the essays.
What this site is not
It is not a business. It is not a shop and not a consulting practice, and it generates no revenue. Nothing here is for sale, no advertising is carried, and there are no affiliate links, sponsorships, donations, or paid tiers. This is unpaid independent writing, and saying so is part of the point: a publication that assesses other people’s claims should be clear about what it stands to gain from them, which here is nothing.
It is not a hardware company. It is not a newsroom, and does not try to cover everything that happens. It is not a course store, a consultancy, or a newsletter funnel. It does not carry stock analysis, price commentary, or any opinion at all about whether you should buy anything.
It does not cover hiring announcements, partnership announcements, contract awards, funding rounds, or national strategy documents that contain no technical number. Quantum sensing, quantum key distribution, and quantum networking are outside its scope — not because they are unimportant, but because they are different fields and pretending otherwise would make the writing worse.
The audience is engineers and technical readers who want to know whether the field moved or only the headline moved, and non-specialists who want one correct frame and then only the updates that matter. Readers looking for investment tips are in the wrong place, and the site is not going to accommodate them.
How results get onto the site
Automated tools are used to watch a small allowlist of sources and to flag candidates. They are sieves. They do not report, they do not teach, and they do not publish. Every brief on this site was read and approved by a person before it appeared, and the Reality Board is only ever changed by hand.
After a brief is published it is frozen. If something in it turns out to be wrong, the correction appears as a dated note at the top of that brief, and the original text stays where it is. Silent edits would make the archive worthless.
Brand disambiguation
Stark Quantum is not a hardware vendor and is not affiliated with StarkWare, the German drone company Stark, Quantum Systems, or Stark Quantum Solutions. The similarity in names is a coincidence of a common surname.
Contact
- Email: info@starkquantum.com
- Feed: RSS, with every essay and brief as it is published
Corrections are welcome and are the most useful thing you can send. If a number on this site is wrong, say which number and where it should come from.
The operator’s postal address and the responsible person under German media law are on the Impressum. What the site stores about a reader, which is close to nothing, is set out in the privacy notice.