Improving discussion of state of the field - paper

[nunezco2]

RE: openjournals/joss-reviews#5329

The current JOSS paper submission would benefit from a detailed discussion of the state of the field. In particular, answers to the following questions are needed:

• How does qiskit_experiments differ from other approaches documented in literature [3]?
• How does qiskit_experiments integrate existing quantum characterization and calibration methods, software packages or artifacts, particularly those mentioned in quantum control literature --e.g., [1,2]?
• What makes the approach documented in the paper novel and profitable for experimentalists across the quantum computing stack in contrast to existing software?
• What are the specific tasks that become less onerous or possible through qiskit_experiments? How is the difference measured or characterized?
• Have comparisons been drawn between code written without the package and code that makes use of it?

References:

[1] Ball, H., Biercuk, M.J., Carvalho, A.R., Chen, J., Hush, M., De Castro, L.A., Li, L., Liebermann, P.J., Slatyer, H.J., Edmunds, C. and Frey, V., 2021. Software tools for quantum control: Improving quantum computer performance through noise and error suppression. Quantum Science and Technology, 6(4), p.044011.

[2] Landig, A. and Wallraff, A., 2013. Software for arbitrary single qubit and qutrit gate calibration (Doctoral dissertation, Master’s thesis, ETH Zurich).

[3] Pasquale, A., Efthymiou, S., Ramos-Calderer, S., Wilkens, J., Roth, I. and Carrazza, S., 2023. Towards an open-source framework to perform quantum calibration and characterization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.10397.

[danielskatz]

part of openjournals/joss-reviews#5329

[eggerdj]

Dear @nunezco2 thank you for the review. We added citations to Ball et al. and Pasquale as you suggested to better reflect the state of the field. Thank you for pointing this out. In addition in PR #1131 we made changes to address the points that you raise.

• We better point out the gain for experimentalists. I.e., (i) complex experiments in the library are easy to run, (ii) Qiskit Experiments provides a base framework on which one can build new experiments, and (iii) Qiskit Experiments provides a framework for calibration.
• The experiment manuals in the documentation which we now link to in the paper point out how easy it is to run a complex experiment such as Quantum Volume.

[danielskatz]

@nunezco2 - can this now be closed?