Quantikz.jl

A minimal package for drawing quantum circuits using the quantikz and tikz TeX libraries.

To install it use:

] add Quantikz

See the attached notebook for examples.

If you have the quantikz and standalone TeX libraries installed, with working pdflatex and convert binaries accessible, the use of this package is as simple as:

circuit = [CNOT(1,2),Measurement(2)]
displaycircuit(circuit)

quantikz is automatically downloaded if you do not have it installed.

If you do not have a working version of convert (which has been problematic on a number of recent operating systems), you can still generate a PDF containing the circuit with:

savepdf(circuit, filename)

If you do not have a functional TeX environment you can still view the corresponding TeX string or save it to file with:

circuit2string(circuit)
savetex(circuit, filename)

As mentioned, quantikz, standalone, pdflatex, and convert are required. You can get the first three by installing most up-to-date TeX distributions like texlive, just be sure to install the full distribution with all subpackages. convert is part of ImageMagick and is necessary for the pdf-to-png conversion.

If you need some of the more advanced features of the quantikz TeX macros that are not implemented here yet, you can edit the string directly, or more conveniently, you can generate the 2D array of macros that makes up the string:

julia> circuit2table([CNOT(1,2),CNOT(2,3)])
3×4 Array{String,2}:
 "\\qw"  "\\ctrl{1}"  "\\qw"       "\\qw"
 "\\qw"  "\\targ{}"   "\\ctrl{1}"  "\\qw"
 "\\qw"  "\\qw"       "\\targ{}"   "\\qw"

table2string can be used for the final conversion.

Built-in quantum circuit operations

CNOT, CPHASE, SWAP, H, P, Id, a generic single qubit gate U, a generic measurement Measurement, and a parity check measurement ParityMeasurement.

The general purpose MultiControl(controls, ocontrols, targets, targetXs) can be used to create an arbitrary combination of muticontrol multiqubit gates. Each argument lists the indices of qubits that should get a certain symbol: controls is filled circles, ocontrols is empty circles, targets is the NOT symbol, and targetXs is the X symbols.

For named controled gates use MultiControlU(str, controls, ocontrols, targets).

For noise events, you can use Noise(targets) or NoiseAll().

For examples of these operations, see the attached notebook.

Custom objects

For your CustomQuantumOperation simply define a QuantikzOp(op::CustomQuantumOperation) that converts your object to one of the built-in objects.

If you need more freedom for your custom quantum operation, simply define update_table!(table,step,op::CustomQuantumOperation) that directly modifies the quantikz table and define affectedqubits(op::CustomQuantumOperation) that gives the indices of qubits involved in the operation. Instead of returning an array of indices affectedqubits can also return the symbol :all which tells the layout engine that all qubits are used in this stage of the circuit.

Internally, this library converts the array of circuit operations to a 2D array of quantikz macros which is then converted to a single TeX string, which is then compiled with a call to pdflatex.