Contact — research, access, partnership

How to reach the programme

This page is the front door to Ireland Quantum 100. It exists because the same five questions arrive in five different inboxes every week, and a single canonical contact surface saves everyone time. If you are a researcher with a pulse-level workload, an engineer who wants rack space adjacent to a dilution fridge, a journalist on deadline, or a procurement lead trying to understand whether a sovereign 100-qubit transmon machine in Clonmel is a fit for your roadmap — start here.

I read inbound directly. I am Mike English, founder and CTO of IMPT.io and the engineering lead for Ireland Quantum 100. The fastest route is mike@impt.io with a subject line that names your workload class — for example "carbon-capture DFT, 40-qubit ansatz" or "grid optimisation QAOA, 18-node MaxCut". Vague intros get a slower reply than specific ones, because specific ones tell me which part of the stack you actually need.

What to send if you want compute access

The Q2 2027 customer-access window is when external workloads first hit the machine. Multi-qubit calibration completes in Q1 2027, single-qubit first-light is on track for the end of Q1, and the access cohort is being assembled now. To be evaluated for that cohort, send the following:

• Workload description. What is the Hamiltonian or the combinatorial structure? VQE on an active space? QAOA on a weighted graph? A Trotterised time-evolution? Be precise about the operator.
• Qubit count and circuit depth. A 100-physical-qubit transmon device with a heavy-hex coupling graph is not a 100-logical-qubit machine. Tell me the width, the two-qubit gate depth, and whether you have a depth-reduction strategy (e.g. Clifford+T resynthesis, ZX-calculus simplification, hardware-efficient ansatz).
• Error budget. What two-qubit gate fidelity does your circuit tolerate before the answer becomes noise? If you do not know, say so — we will help you estimate it against expected coherence times.
• Software stack. Qiskit, PennyLane, Cirq, raw OpenQASM 3, or pulse-level via Qiskit Pulse / a custom QASM 3 extension. We support all four ingestion paths; knowing which one you live in changes how we onboard you.
• Classical co-processing needs. Most useful workloads in this regime are hybrid. If you need GPU pre/post-processing co-located in the Clonmel facility, say so up front — that is a different SLA from cold submit-and-wait.

Research collaboration — what we are looking for

Quantum collaboration in Ireland is small enough that we know most of the people working on it, and large enough that we cannot have spoken to all of them. Climate-relevant chemistry is the priority cohort, and within that, the workloads I most want to see in the pipeline are:

• Amine and metal-organic framework chemistry for direct air capture. Active-space VQE on CO₂-binding sites where the static correlation defeats CCSD(T). If you have a UCCSD or k-UpCCGSD ansatz already running on a simulator, you are most of the way there.
• Photovoltaic candidate screening. Excited-state methods on perovskite and organic absorbers — qEOM, subspace expansion, or quantum Krylov.
• Battery cathode materials. Lithium-rich and sodium-ion candidates where strong correlation in the transition-metal d-shell makes classical DFT+U a coin-toss.
• Nitrogenase and CO₂-reductase models. Iron-sulphur cluster electronic structure remains one of the genuinely defensible quantum-advantage targets, and it sits inside the climate remit because of fertiliser energy intensity.
• Grid and climate-finance optimisation. QAOA and warm-started variants on real Irish grid topologies; portfolio rebalancing under transition-risk constraints.

If your workload is not on that list but is climate-adjacent and you can defend why a noisy 100-qubit transmon device gives you something a GPU cluster does not, I want to hear it. The honest filter is: does the problem have structure that maps cleanly onto a heavy-hex topology, and is the answer interesting before fault-tolerance?

Partnership and procurement

For commercial conversations — supplier integration, hosted access, IMPT offset-stack chemistry workloads where Ireland Quantum 100 sits on the back end — the same email reaches me, but please flag the subject line with [PARTNERSHIP] or [PROCUREMENT]. I will route you to the right conversation, which depending on the ask is either me directly, the IMPT commercial team, or the Q100 site-build programme.

Procurement leads should know up front: we are not selling time on the machine before Q2 2027, we are not quoting per-shot pricing yet, and we will not pretend otherwise to win a slot on a roadmap slide. What we will do is sign an MoU describing intended workload, expected access window, and the calibration regime your circuits will run under. That is enough for most enterprise architecture committees to plan against.

Press and journalists

For press, the fastest reply comes from a short email stating outlet, deadline, and the specific question. I do not do "general background" calls because they consume hours and produce nothing checkable. I will do a thirty-minute technical call on a named angle, on the record, with the understanding that I will correct the physics if it gets mangled in edit. The site is in The Old Museum, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary; site visits are possible from Q4 2026 once the cryostat is in and the RF lines are routed, not before.

What we do with your message

Inbound is logged, triaged within five working days, and routed to one of three tracks: research cohort evaluation, commercial pipeline, or press. Research-cohort messages get a technical reply from me; if the workload is a fit, the next step is a one-hour call to size the circuit against the expected device parameters and agree a calibration-window target inside the Q2 2027 access ramp. We are building the access cohort deliberately small for first-customer year, so the bar is workload quality, not headcount. If you have read this far, you already know what to send — the right email, with the right Hamiltonian or graph attached, gets you a reply this week.