Qiskit Experimentalist Tools

Quantum computers process information leveraging principles from quantum mechanics, including superposition, entanglement, and interference. This approach enables the development of novel algorithms and the capability to tackle computational challenges that are beyond the reach of traditional computers. Quantum computers require specialized quantum hardware, and the different elements in the quantum hardware have properties that must be characterized to calibrate the quantum gates that process the information. Furthermore, the quality of these gates must be benchmarked to measure the overall performance of the quantum computer. This characterization and calibration require an extensive set of experiments and analysis routines.

Qiskit Experiments provides both a library of standard quantum characterization, calibration, and verification experiments, and a general framework for implementing custom experiments that can be run on quantum devices through Qiskit. It is an open source, Python package streamlining the running of experiments and analyzing the results.

Qiskit Experiments relies heavily on the Qiskit framework, with experiments being centered around quantum circuits constructed using Qiskit methods. Many of the experiments require fine-grained tuning of the relevant circuits and rely on Qiskit Pulse, Qiskit's extension for directly controlling the pulses driving the quantum gates.

Given the required IBM credentials, experiment results can be stored in a dedicated database, which contains the various analysis results and generated figures of each experiment, while displaying them via a convenient web UI. Database interaction is done either from Qiskit Experiments or using directly the separate library that Qiskit Experiments relies upon.

Understanding the physical behavior of quantum systems is a key component in designing and controlling quantum computers. Qiskit Dynamics is an open source Python package providing tools for simulating models of quantum systems at the physical level, which allow us to build better models of the underlying physical processes on each device. This in turn allows us to design and optimize better logic gates, thereby improving the overall performance of each quantum computer.