As interest in quantum computing grows, there is a pressing need for standardized API's so that algorithm designers, circuit designers, and physicists can be provided a common reference frame for designing, executing, and optimizing experiments. There is also a need for a language specification that goes beyond gates and allows users to specify the time dynamics of a quantum experiment and recover the time dynamics of the output. In this document we provide a specification for a common interface to backends (simulators and experiments) and a standarized data structure (Qobj --- quantum object) for sending experiments to those backends via Qiskit. We also introduce OpenPulse, a language for specifying pulse level control (i.e. control of the continuous time dynamics) of a general quantum device independent of the specific hardware implementation.
@article{arxiv.1809.03452,
title = {Qiskit Backend Specifications for OpenQASM and OpenPulse Experiments},
author = {David C. McKay and Thomas Alexander and Luciano Bello and Michael J. Biercuk and Lev Bishop and Jiayin Chen and Jerry M. Chow and Antonio D. Córcoles and Daniel Egger and Stefan Filipp and Juan Gomez and Michael Hush and Ali Javadi-Abhari and Diego Moreda and Paul Nation and Brent Paulovicks and Erick Winston and Christopher J. Wood and James Wootton and Jay M. Gambetta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.03452},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
68 pages. More information and schemas can be found in the Qiskit repository https://github.com/Qiskit/