Qiskit Fall Fest IIT Bombay

Qiskit Fall Fest 2026

Write your first
quantum program.
Run it on
real hardware.

Oct–Nov 2026 IIT Bombay · Powai Free No prerequisites
Drag to rotate

Try it

This is hour one.

Press a gate. The qubit moves. Everything below is real linear algebra — the same 2×2 matrices Qiskit applies, running in your browser.

Apply a gate

State vector

Measure in the computational basis

|0⟩100.0%
|1⟩0.0%

Your circuit

The programme

Five sessions,
in sequence.

Each one stands alone. Quantum101 → Hackathon is the route we would take.

Note

Dates, times and venues are confirmed. Register your interest and we will email you a reminder before each session.

01

Quantum101

Qubits, superposition and measurement, built from scratch and demonstrated live in Qiskit.

13 Oct 6:30–8:00 PM IST LC102 Workshop
02

Guest Speaker Talk

Someone from the quantum industry on where the field actually is, and what has been oversold.

14 Oct 6:30–8:00 PM IST Online Talk
03

Professor Talk

An IIT Bombay faculty view of the physics under the abstraction — how a qubit is built and kept coherent.

15 Oct 7:00–8:30 PM IST LC101 Talk
04

Quantum Hackathon

Teams, a problem statement, mentors, and access to IBM Quantum hardware. 36 hours, non-stop. Prep material is below.

16 Oct Starts 8:00 PM IST · 36 hrs Online Hackathon
05

Lab Visits & Closing Ceremony

A walk through the hardware and instrumentation on campus, then results and closing remarks.

18 Oct 2:00–5:00 PM IST Physics Seminar Room Lab visit

Where it runs

Not a simulator.

Hackathon circuits are queued to an IBM superconducting processor — transmons on a heavy-hex lattice, held near 15 millikelvin. This is the shape of one.

Heavy-hex coupling map · every qubit has at most 3 neighbours

Bell state · H then CNOT · 1024 shots

|00⟩0
|01⟩0
|10⟩0
|11⟩0

Two qubits, entangled. Neither one has a value of its own — but they always agree. The stray counts in the middle two rows are readout error, and on real hardware they never quite reach zero.

job complete

Resources

Everything,
before and after.

All free, all link-checked. Session slides and notebooks land here as the fest runs.

↗Do this first

IBM Quantum Platform account

Free. Get your API token before Quantum101 so you are not setting up during the session.

quantum.cloud.ibm.com
↗Setup

Install Qiskit

Virtual environment, pip install qiskit, Jupyter. 64-bit only from v2.0.

quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs
↗Overview

What Qiskit actually is

The SDK, the transpiler, the primitives, and the runtime that ties them together.

ibm.com/quantum/qiskit
↗Course hub

IBM Quantum Learning

Successor to the old Qiskit Textbook — ten-plus free courses with runnable code.

quantum.cloud.ibm.com/learning
↗Course

Basics of Quantum Information

John Watrous. The single best foundation if you want the maths done properly.

quantum.cloud.ibm.com/learning
↗Lecture series

Qiskit Global Summer School

Graduate-level lectures, free. The natural next step after the fest.

youtube.com
↗Docs

Qiskit & IBM Quantum documentation

API reference, transpilation guides, error mitigation. Keep this tab open at the hackathon.

quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs
↗Notebooks

Official Qiskit tutorials

End-to-end: CHSH, QAOA, VQE, quantum kernels, Grover, Shor. Steal the patterns.

quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/tutorials
↗Source

Qiskit SDK on GitHub

Python with a Rust core. The changelog is the fastest way to find what a function really does.

github.com/Qiskit/qiskit
↗Best practice set

IBM Quantum Challenge 2024

Labs 0–4 plus a bonus, auto-graded, solutions in the repo. Do this one before the hackathon.

github.com/qiskit-community
↗Practice

QDC Challenges 2025

More recent, closer to the current Qiskit 2.x API than the older challenge sets.

github.com/qiskit-community
↗Tool

Quantum Challenge Grader

Install it and the challenge notebooks above will check your answers as you go.

github.com/qiskit-community
↗Libraries

Qiskit Ecosystem

Community tools that plug into Qiskit — chemistry, optimisation, ML, visualisation.

github.com/Qiskit/ecosystem
↗Video

Qiskit on YouTube

Lectures, seminars, release walkthroughs and the Qiskit patterns series.

youtube.com/@qiskit
↗Community

Qiskit Slack

Where the developers answer. Join before the hackathon — #qiskit and #help are quick.

qisk.it/join-slack
↗Q&A

Quantum Computing Stack Exchange

For the conceptual questions. Search before asking — most first-year confusions are answered.

quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com
↗Official

Qiskit Fall Fest 2026 — IBM announcement

The post announcing this year's fest and its “decade of quantum on the cloud” theme.

ibm.com/quantum/blog
Coming soon

Quantum101 — slides & notebook

Posted here within a day of session 01, along with the solutions.

Posted after the session
Coming soon

Speaker slides

Decks from the guest and professor talks, where the speakers are happy for us to.

Posted after the session
Coming soon

Hackathon problem statements

Problem set, starter notebooks and submission instructions go up when the hackathon opens.

Posted at the hackathon

Questions

Before you register.

Anything missing, mail the organising team — the address is at the bottom.

Who can attend?

Any IIT Bombay student, any department, any year — undergraduate, postgraduate or PhD. Access for participants from outside campus will be confirmed alongside the schedule.

Do I need a physics background?

No. Quantum101 assumes complex numbers and a Python loop. Everything else is built from there.

How much Python do I need?

Enough to write a function and a loop. If you have used NumPy once, you are comfortably ahead.

Do I really get to use a quantum computer?

Yes. A free IBM Quantum account puts your circuits on real superconducting processors. You will see the noise, the queue and the counts for yourself.

Can I come to only some sessions?

Yes. Each session stands on its own. The hackathon assumes Quantum101, so do that one first if you can.

What should I bring?

A laptop with Python and Qiskit installed, and an IBM Quantum account. Both links are in Resources.

Is it free?

Every session is free. Places at the hackathon and the lab visits may be limited by room capacity, so registration order will matter for those.

Register & reach us

Put your name down.

One email when dates land, one before each session. Nothing else.

Register your interest

The form goes live with the confirmed schedule. Until then the fastest route in is an email to the organising team.

Registration opens soon →

Placeholder — this button will point at the registration form once it is live.

Organising team

Sessions, accessibility, collaborations and sponsorship all come to the same inbox.

Email
your-email@iitb.ac.in
Instagram
@handle
LinkedIn
page URL
Venue
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076