Two new quantum milestones

Welcome back to Circuit Breaker, where you can find the latest news and updates on innovations in AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and more, from across IBM Research and beyond.

Week of March 16 - 20

• IBM’s Charles H. Bennett receives ACM A.M. Turing Award

• Doubling down on open-access quantum computing

An IBMer’s foundational quantum work has been recognized with the Turing Award

IBM Fellow Charles H. Bennett received the Turing Award this week, named after Alan M. Turing — the British mathematician and founder of modern computing — for his contributions to computer science that have led to the current quantum revolution. Often called the “Nobel Prize in computing,” the Turing Award is given each year by the Association for Computing Machinery. This is the first time the Turing Award has recognized achievements in quantum research,

Bennett, who has worked at IBM since the early 1970s, shares the prize with his longtime collaborator, Université de Montréal professor Gilles Brassard. The two began working together in 1979, studying the theory and practice of the physics of information processing.

“IBM was an ideal place to do this kind of research because you had people working on the fundamental physics of computing and hardware, and in the same building people focused on the mathematics of computing,” Bennett said. “I could wander down the hall and talk to many people about fundamental ideas and in fields that, at that time, scarcely overlapped.”

In 2016, years after Bennett, Brassard, and colleagues had established the foundations of quantum information science, IBM put its first 5-qubit quantum computer on the cloud. Since then, IBM has deployed more than 85 quantum systems to the cloud - more than all other players in the field combined - to a rapidly growing ecosystem of enterprises, universities, research institutions, startups, national laboratories and more. As IBM accelerates the race towards large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers, this network of more than 300 organizations is exploring how IBM's global fleet of quantum computers could help to solve their most complex challenges, many of which remain intractable for classical computers working alone.

Read more about how Charles Bennett helped set the stage for the quantum revolution.

Watch an interview with Charles Bennett about winning the Turing Award.

A new way to access a quantum computer

The IBM Quantum Open Plan is a free offering from IBM, meant to help students and other beginners get acquainted with the basics of quantum computing on the cloud with real quantum hardware. Users can access up to 10 minutes of quantum runtime every 28 days, making it possible to run small circuits, get acquainted with Qiskit, learn about basic quantum algorithms, and even check out some quantum-classical workflows.

Now, the terms of the IBM Quantum Open Plan have improved even further: Users who log 20 minutes of runtime within any 12-month period qualify for a one-time promotion that grants 180 minutes of runtime for the next 12 months.

With the added time, researchers can also make use of the IBM Quantum Heron r2 processor ibm_kingston, previously only available to paid users.

The promotion is part of IBM’s broader vision of a world where quantum computing is not only available for currently intractable scientific problems, but also accessible to everyone

Read more about how to take advantage of this special offer.

Your Agents Are Making Decisions. Your Data Is Still Catching Up.

IBM announces expanded partnership with NVIDIA at this year’s #GTC2026

The path to quantum advantage in optimization

Highlighting new publications from IBM researchers that we liked the sound of:

• From Reflection to Repair: A Scoping Review of Dataset Documentation Tools

• Momentum-Accelerated Structured Preconditioning for Physics-InformedNeural Networks

• Observable estimation in the absence of classical verification

• NLE: Non-autoregressive LLM-based ASR by Transcript Editing

For more on the latest news, be sure to follow IBM Research on LinkedIn. And if you want to go even deeper, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Future Forward for more on the latest news on breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing and hybrid cloud.