C2QA - 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 [1]–[5] and by efficient Gaussian boson sampling simulation of the Franck-Condon spectra of triatomic molecules [6] 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 IBM Qiskit. IBM Qiskit is an open-source software development toolkit (SDK) for simulating the quantum state of a quantum circuit and for running the same circuits on prototype hardware within the IBM Quantum Experience. We introduce the Bosonic Qiskit software to enable the simulation of hybrid qubit/bosonic systems using the existing Qiskit software development kit [7]. 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 JaynesCummings models, bosonic Hubbard models, plotting Wigner functions and animations, and calculating maximum likelihood estimations using Wigner functions.