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Unitary Fund is pleased to announce IBM Quantum has granted special quantum computing access to the Unitary Fund community. Thanks to this partnership, recipients of a Unitary Fund micro-grant will receive the following benefits: - A larger share of the queue on open IBM Quantum systems. - Access to additional, non-open systems. - The ability to book dedicated time on a system. These benefits will spur further innovation in the quantum computing space, and directly enables Unitary Fund's mission of helping create a quantum technology ecosystem that benefits the most people. We are particularly pleased to be able to extend these benefits to the explorers in quantum technology who do not have a formal academic affiliation. Moreover, through this partnership, our technical team at Unitary Labs will further benchmark Mitiq, our open-source quantum error mitigating compiler, on real quantum hardware. The Unitary Fund team would like to thank IBM Quantum for their support, in particular Sebastian Hassinger, IBM Quantum Research & Ecosystem Partnerships Lead.

Together with the Quantum Open Source Foundation, we are thrilled to open nominations for the 2021 Wittek Quantum Prize for Open Source Software. This US$4000 prize is dedicated to celebrating open source software contributors in the quantum computing space. The prize is named after the late Peter Wittek, a strongly vocal advocate for open source software in research. Open source software tools are critical to basically all modern technologies, and quantum tech is no exception. Building an open-source-first stack for quantum development is essential to securing open access to this new technology, as well as accelerating progress across the field. Despite the central role that the open source software plays, the contributions of diligent individuals and hard work of maintainers are often not recognized by the wider community at the level they deserve. In order to recognize the work of these unsung heroes, developers and maintainers, often unaware of the magnitude of the impact their work is having on the community, Unitary Fund is partnering with the QOSF in order to award a US$4000 prize to an open source software contributor / maintainer to help provide the recognition they deserve. The winner of the prize will be selected by the Unitary Fund’s advisory board, which kindly agreed to act as independent evaluation committee. Last year, we were happy to award the inaugural prize to Roger Luo. If you want to learn about Roger and his work, please check out this video interview and Quantum Software Talk. Read more about the 2021 Wittek Quantum Prize on the award website. If you know individuals that you’d like to nominate, or you’d like to nominate yourself, please submit in this form.

The wait is over: the latest Quantum Open Source Software survey is now open! Our annual survey is back to give everyone in quantum tech a voice to weigh in and build a clearer, more representative view of where the field and community stands. The survey explores topics ranging from community demographics to research focus, tools, and platforms. Whether you build or use quantum software in any capacity, we’d love for you to take ~20 minutes to complete the survey. This year's QOSS survey will be open a bit longer: through Thursday, October 29, 2026. Thank you for helping us capture this snapshot! Ready to take the survey? Click here to get started! Like every year, to serve as a helpful asset for the entire ecosystem, all anonymized data will be made public to help everyone better understand the community's needs. Unitary Foundation will synthesize the data, highlight key insights, and publish the full summary on our website later this year. A huge thank you to the Unitary Foundation members, advisors, and partners who helped build, test, and refine this survey to ensure it remains a valuable community asset. Fill out the QOSS Survey

This is a post by Mathys Rennela, UF’s newest year-long Fellow, who will be working on Error Correction research and community building with support from the Mozilla Foundation. I am Mathys Rennela, a quantum software researcher based in Paris. My experience working at the intersection of formal methods and quantum algorithmics has led me more recently to jump onto what I see as quantum computing’s biggest bottleneck: quantum error correction. As I was working on implementing new quantum error correction protocols, I realized a critical gap in quantum software tooling. Say that you are at the end of a coding sprint; you want to make sure that your newest quantum error correction tool actually corrects quantum errors. Typically, like for any software, you would make sure that there is a battery of unit tests analyzing your code, or you would try to formally prove some subset of it. The problem is that the properties of good quantum software are only verifiable by solving NP-complete problems, or running stochastic simulations that tend to produce flaky unit tests. I take from this that quantum error correction has a fundamental verification problem that I want to tackle. I am now part of the 2026-2027 cohort of the Mozilla Fellowship, a year-long program by the Mozilla Foundation which aims to push the boundaries of open source software. My aim is simple: > Building the foundational verification layer for quantum error correction, and fostering a community which makes the use of such tools standard practice. Quantum error correction software has a silent failure problem. A structural bug in a detector error model (the intermediate representation of an annotated and compressed noise model) often surfaces only after a long Monte Carlo simulation, and sometimes never. Because decoders trust their input, a flawed model silently inflates logical error rates and may not be caught until deployment. Currently, fault-tolerant compilers have zero awareness of error correction semantics, so topological and logical inconsistencies (dead detectors, undetectable logical flips) slip straight through. The cost is real: wasted HPC runtime and, more dangerously, wasted research and development time. In the classical world, generic linters (like ESLint) keep software clean. QEC needs a domain-specific linter which catches defects early, cheaply, and before a single stochastic shot is executed. The center piece of my research program for this year is emlint, the first static linter for detector error models. Built with Stim as dependency, emlint ingests raw .dem files or .stim circuits directly and evaluates them against core structural & deterministic checks in milliseconds. Right now, emlint checks six fundamental properties: Sensitivity: orphaned / dead detectors never triggered by any mechanism Detectability: undetectable logical errors (flip observable, trigger no syndrome) Correctability: logical observable not protected by the code Observable coverage: observable never touched by any mechanism Probability bounds: NaN / negative / unphysical error rates Duplicates: duplicate fault signatures Underpinning emlint is a rigorous algebraic formalism. Category theory is used as a design framework to break down the many challenges in establishing a verification pipeline into simpler, tractable problems. The fellowship roadmap extends towards automated and human-readable counter-example construction (for easier debugging), code-level verification, automated code discovery (linter as AI harness), and extension library system (to author custom checks). But a mathematically sound or well-developed tool won’t be enough on its own. Developing a core user base early on and building in the open is essential to drive adoption of good quantum software practices in quantum error correction. I am taking all the advantages of this fellowship to build in the open. My community plan mirrors tried and tested open source software practices, by learning from the development of linters like ESLint for JavaScript. > Clear documentation and demos, conference and developer meetups, mentorship and hackathons, and upstream open source contributions are essential to build a healthy software ecosystem. My goal would be for emlint to be as essential for quantum error correction as the linter Clippy is to Rust: so well-integrated that one forgets it even exists. I see emlint as a contribution to facilitate QEC open source software development. Quantum software development abides by the same rules as conventional software development, and it is more than time to engage with the wider open source community and foster collaboration. There is a preliminary version of emlint already available on GitHub. Try it, integrate it to your continuous integration pipeline, and send me your feedback via Discord (username: mathysrennela_96389)! If you want help debugging your QEC simulations, if you want to contribute to a check, or if you feel like telling me where your pain points are, let’s figure it out together!

Dear all, It is a pleasure to announce that Xanadu has formally joined the Unitary Foundation as our newest Supporting Member! This partnership feels like a natural homecoming. As the team behind PennyLane, Xanadu has long been a vital champion of the open-source philosophy that we hold dear. By formalizing this relationship, they are doubling down on their support for the community-driven initiatives—from microgrants to collaborative research—that keep the quantum ecosystem vibrant and inclusive. Our teams have spent years working toward the same objective: a transparent and collaborative path toward useful quantum advantage. Xanadu’s pioneering work in both photonic hardware and cross-platform software adds a unique layer of expertise to our network, helping us better support the independent developers who are building the next generation of quantum applications. “Xanadu has consistently demonstrated that open-source is not just a strategy, but a core value for building the future of quantum,” said Ben Castanon, UF CEO. “Having them join as a Supporting Member is a testament to our shared goals. We’ve admired their work for a long time, and we look forward to working even more closely with them to empower the next generation of quantum innovators.” “The Unitary Foundation has cultivated a thriving quantum community, successfully bridging the gap between independent researchers and industry leaders,” said Josh Izaac, Director of Product at Xanadu. “We are proud to strengthen that connection through our formal support and a shared commitment to open-source development. Together, we look forward to driving continuous innovation across the quantum ecosystem.” We are particularly excited about the opportunities this creates to bridge the gap between community software projects and cutting-edge hardware. This membership marks a new chapter in our collaborative efforts to build a more open and robust quantum stack. Please help us welcome Xanadu to the membership program. We can't wait to see what the future holds for this partnership. With warmth, The UF Team