The highlights of IEEE Quantum Week 2026, theme by theme

IEEE Quantum Week 2026 filled the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from 13 to 18 September, and this guide sorts 790 of its talks, panels and tutorials into 23 themes. Read together, they suggest that the ordinary machines around the qubits set most of the pace. On the last morning of IEEE Quantum Week 2026, Friday 18 September, Matthias Troyer of Microsoft stood up in Hall G of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and called the meeting engineering first and quantum second. Then Troyer described a quantum computer from the engineer’s side. Seen that way, it is mostly a classical machine joined to a fast network, and the qubits do their work only when classical signals tell them to. The quantum calculation, in Troyer’s phrase, is a side effect of those signals. Every one of them has to be paid for. Troyer’s point was cost. Working back from what a chemist would pay to use a machine every day, Troyer arrived at about ten dollars a qubit for the electronics that drive and read it. At that price a rack of instruments for each qubit is out of the question, so the layer that shapes every pulse has to move into…