Quantum Computing is an emerging field that leverages the principles of quantum mechanics to process information. A key library used for Quantum Computing in Python is Qiskit. This blog will cover the very basics of implementing a simple quantum circuit using Python's Qiskit package.
Qiskit is an open-source framework for Quantum Computing. It provides tools for creating and manipulating quantum programs and running them on prototype quantum devices on IBM Q Experience or on simulators on a local computer.
Make sure you have Python 3.5 or later installed. Then you can install Qiskit using pip.
pip install qiskit
Let's create a simple quantum circuit with a single qubit. For this, we first import the necessary modules from qiskit.
from qiskit import QuantumCircuit
Then, we create a quantum circuit with one quantum bit (qubit).
qc = QuantumCircuit(1)
We just formed a quantum circuit with a single idle qubit.
We can apply quantum gates to this qubit. Here, let's apply a Pauli-X gate, which flips a |0> state to |1> and vice versa.
qc.x(0)
This applies a Pauli-X gate to the qubit at index 0.
Qiskit also enables us to easily visualise our quantum circuits. We can do this using circuit.draw().
print(qc.draw())
This should output a simple circuit with one qubit and a single X-gate.
To run the circuit, we will need to use a simulator or an actual quantum computer. Here, the Qiskit Aer simulator is used.
from qiskit import Aer, execute simulator = Aer.get_backend('qasm_simulator') job = execute(qc, simulator) result = job.result() counts = result.get_counts(qc) print("\nTotal counts are:",counts)
This would output the state of our qubit after applying the Pauli-X gate.
At its core, this is how you would construct basic quantum circuits with Python's Qiskit. Remember, quantum computing is an immensely complex field, and this scratches only the very surface of it. For further learning, the official Qiskit documentation is a good place to start.