Meet the Spring 2026 cohort

The Spring 2026 cohort is building on real IonQ hardware this season: tools, music, visualizations, and games. Here is the lineup, project by project.

Qatalyst Game: race a quantum computer at route planning

Dr Siti Fariya · Qatalyst Quantum

Browser game racing you against a classical solver and live IonQ hardware on vehicle routing. Five stops feel easy, twenty feel brutal, and that gap between intuition and quantum compute lands viscerally.

The game runs in the browser and sends real workloads to IonQ in the background. Built on React and Leaflet with a QAOA reformulation of the vehicle routing problem.

Siti is a postdoctoral researcher at Heriot-Watt and the founder of Qatalyst Quantum. Her startup has cohorted through Conception X, Microsoft Founders Hub, Quantinuum Q-NET, and the Kipu Quantum Hub.

She spent two years at the Port of Dover building traffic models, which grounded this project's framing.

qOrbital: see electrons as both clouds and trajectories

Aryan Bawa · Dartmouth, with Arnav Singh

Interactive molecular orbital visualizer powered by VQE runs on IonQ, with both probability-cloud and Bohmian trajectory views.

When a chemist draws a molecule, the electrons are not really dots. They are fuzzy clouds of probability. qOrbital runs real quantum hardware to compute those clouds for simple molecules.

The dual view sets it apart. The Copenhagen interpretation gives you the cloud, the Bohmian gives you the dot moving through it. Both come from the same hardware-derived wavefunction.

Aryan is a Physics and Mathematics student at Dartmouth, working in the Whitfield Group on quantum algorithms for circuit approximation. He is the developer of qsp-proc, an open-source Qiskit package for QSP phase-finding.

The pipeline runs VQE with a UCCSD ansatz and realistic shot budgets, with a clean fallback to simulator. Code lives at github.com/qorbital-lab/qorbital, with hooks for community-contributed molecules.

Superposition Sequencer: quantum circuits as a playable instrument

Francisco Estivallet · Incomputable

Web-based music sequencer where the quantum circuit is the instrument, including MIDI control and live circuit projection.

Instead of an algorithm with random numbers, it is a real quantum computation producing pattern after pattern. The framing treats quantum hardware as an instrument rather than a science experiment, the line that separates this from gimmick. Building circuits that produce specific sonic textures becomes the creative loop, like patching a synth for specific tones.

Francisco is a mechatronics engineer and creative technologist with fifteen-plus years of experience. His work spans robotics, industrial automation, data products, and interactive installations.

Through his practice Incomputable in Barcelona, he ships tools and prototypes for artists, designers, and research labs. Recent work includes six installations at Sikka Art Festival in Dubai and an EU Starts and MUSAE Residency prototype.

The Sequencer ships with a downloadable sequence library so people without hardware access can still play the patterns.

Quantum Butterfly Field: the no-butterfly effect, made tangible

Xinyi Zhang

Interactive artwork driven by real scrambling circuits, making the no-butterfly effect tangible.

It is a real quantum-information result where small perturbations in a scrambled system can be fully recovered. The aim is to turn abstract quantum information theory into something you can see and sense with your body. The piece sits at the art-science intersection rather than tooling for developers, which broadens the reach.

Xinyi is a multidisciplinary artist and technologist exploring the intersections of nature, spirituality, and computational media. She holds computer science degrees from MIT and the University of British Columbia.

Her engineering work spans Disney, Pixar, and Google. Her research on Generative AI for Computer Animation won Best Paper at SIGGRAPH MIG.

The piece doubles as a teaching artifact for anyone working with quantum scrambling.

GraFT: see what fault-tolerant compilation actually looks like

David Nizovsky · Vanderbilt / Superquantum, with Daniil Shatokhin

3D explorable graphs of how a single logical gate expands into thousands of fault-tolerant physical operations.

GraFT renders the full graph including magic state distillation and syndrome extraction. The piece makes the enormous overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computing feel real rather than abstract. That is rare in a notoriously theoretical subfield.

David is a Quantum Applications Engineer at Superquantum, where he leads rmsynth, an open-source library for fault-tolerant circuit synthesis. He is finishing a B.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt. Previously he won the QRISE Challenge for a neutral-atom compilation visualizer.

Daniil is a Vanderbilt student specializing in low-level systems programming and scalable computational architecture. He previously co-engineered the backend for Qubitcoin.

The team has the rmsynth precedent to ship cleanly here.

QuantumRegimeRadar: empirical quantum kernels for market regimes

Alireza Khodaei, PhD · Nelnet, with Aaron Ben-Shalom

Quantum kernel-based market regime detection, empirically backtested against GARCH baselines.

The work tries to detect different kinds of market stress, including crashes, recoveries, and sideways grind, using real historical data. It is grounded in empirical backtesting rather than the usual quantum-finance hype. The aim is to show where quantum kernels help and where they do not.

Alireza holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln plus an MBA in Finance. His doctoral work developed a quantum-enhanced framework for GARCH parameter estimation using quantum annealing.

That empirical foundation directly informs the regime library here. Others can plug in their own regimes and rerun backtests on real hardware.

Musiq: voices that harmonize through entanglement

Tomoya Hatanaka, with Emmanuella Adams

Polyphonic generative music using quantum walks for melody and entanglement across voices for harmony, on 30 to 40 qubit circuits.

The voices harmonize in ways no classical computer can produce. That gives you something genuinely quantum to listen to, not just read about. The 30 to 40 qubit circuits genuinely need IonQ hardware. Ballistic spread from quantum walks produces musical leaps impossible classically.

Tomoya recently completed a master's at the University of Tokyo, with research in quantum error correction and hash functions. He also initiated KetQat, an open-source project aimed at making quantum computing more accessible.

Musiq is the strongest hardware story of the cohort's three music projects. The case for why a simulator falls short here is clear.

Quantum Patterns: PQCA compositions for live coders

Peter Thomas · ICCMR, with Paulo Vitor Itaboraí

Partitioned quantum cellular automata as the engine for live-coded musical composition.

The patterns come from real quantum circuits, not random number generators. The result is music that is structurally coherent but never repeats. The textures are aimed at musicians who want a new instrument, not at physicists.

PQCA outputs are genuinely quantum rather than mapped randomness, which differentiates this from the noise-as-music genre.

Peter is a musician, live coder, and researcher whose doctoral work at the University of Plymouth produced Zen and Satori. Both are web-based live coding environments for quantum computer music. He is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research and co-authored research on the Variational Quantum Harmoniser.

The build feeds back into the existing Satori community directly.

Quantum Market Game: trading floor as an entanglement primer

Aadarsh Venkat Ramanan

High-school built market simulator that surfaces entanglement and superposition through trading mechanics.

Players make trading decisions while a real quantum computer drives the market behavior. Designed for high school and early college students who know math but have never touched quantum computing.

The familiar market-game format earns its keep, with entanglement-as-correlation framed for classroom students to actually follow. Structured for classroom adoption.

Aadarsh has shipped quantum code solo before. The near-zero compute ask was unusual enough to be worth rewarding on its own.

QuantumCanvas: a sandbox for the post-tutorial 'now what'

Shivani Mayekar · Georgia Tech

Drag-and-drop visual sandbox for composing and running new quantum algorithms on real hardware.

Designed for people who have finished quantum tutorials but find actually building new circuits intimidating and repetitive. The post-tutorial gap is real, and the modular-primitives approach gives a way through. It does not require restarting from scratch every time.

Shivani is an M.S. Computer Science student at Georgia Tech. Her quantum work includes winning the QRISE 2024 Infleqtion Challenge and participating in Womanium Quantum AI research.

She co-founded Qtangled and has organized quantum computing workshops for over 250 participants.

QCFlows: how measurement basis changes what you see

Paulo Vitor Itaboraí · Cyprus Institute / DESY, with Iosifina Angelidi and Kostas Blekos

Interactive visualizer for quantum correlations and basis-dependent measurement views of circuits.

Aimed at researchers and advanced students who want intuition for how entanglement manifests differently under different views. Most quantum visualizers fix one view; this one moves between them, which is the distinct angle.

The team has an existing working prototype, plus DESY and Cyprus Institute affiliations behind it. Paulo also works on Quantum Patterns this season, which gives the cohort a rare cross-project link. We are excited to see how it lands once teams start sharing demos.

Entangled Body: a quantum-inspired body where touch ripples non-locally

Chanhyuk Park · HKU, with Luke Shim

A point-cloud visualization of a human body where touching one area triggers non-local responses elsewhere, inspired by entanglement.

The user moves the viewpoint and the body reveals itself differently each time. The framing borrows from artist Julian Voss-Andreae's quantum sculpture practice. The piece sits in art-meets-science territory rather than a developer tool.

The team has a working MVP. They plan to wire in real quantum circuit backing as the build progresses. Quantum-conceptual framing here is honest rather than hyped, which is rarer than it should be in this space.

Quantum Systemic Oracle: quantum compute as an on-chain primitive

Jamie Dominguez

A blockchain oracle that publishes a quantum-computed 'systemic risk score' for financial markets every day. Smart contracts and prediction markets can use the quantum-derived risk data as a primitive.

The framing is commoditizing quantum compute as an on-chain data feed. Solo developer spanning quantum, smart contracts, oracles, and finance APIs is a high-risk stack. LLM assistance carries parts of the build forward.

More to come

More teams are still finalizing paperwork and will join the lineup over the coming weeks. Individual project stories will land on qollab.xyz across the next few weeks and months as teams share progress.

The community Slack is where teams share early code, sketches, and questions. The Fall RFP cycle opens later this year, shifting toward applied domains in optimization and logistics.