Bosonic Qiskit
The practical benefits of hybrid quantum information processing hardware that
contains continuous-variable objects (bosonic modes such as mechanical or
electromagnetic oscillators) in addition to traditional (discrete-variable)
qubits have recently been demonstrated by experiments with bosonic codes that
reach the break-even point for quantum error correction and by efficient
Gaussian boson sampling simulation of the Franck-Condon spectra of triatomic
molecules that is well beyond the capabilities of current qubit-only hardware.
The goal of this Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA) project is to
develop an instruction set architecture (ISA) for hybrid qubit/bosonic mode
systems that contains an inventory of the fundamental operations and
measurements that are possible in such hardware. The corresponding abstract
machine model (AMM) would also contain a description of the appropriate error
models associated with the gates, measurements and time evolution of the
hardware. This information has been implemented as an extension of Qiskit.
Qiskit is an opensource software development toolkit (SDK) for simulating the
quantum state of a quantum circuit on a system with Python 3.7+ and for running
the same circuits on prototype hardware within the IBM Quantum Lab. We
introduce the Bosonic Qiskit software to enable the simulation of hybrid
qubit/bosonic systems using the existing Qiskit software development kit. This
implementation can be used for simulating new hybrid systems, verifying
proposed physical systems, and modeling systems larger than can currently be
constructed. We also cover tutorials and example use cases included within the
software to study Jaynes- Cummings models, bosonic Hubbard models, plotting
Wigner functions and animations, and calculating maximum likelihood estimations
using Wigner functions.
Timothy J Stavenger Eleanor Crane Kevin Smith Christopher T Kang Steven M Girvin Nathan Wiebe