SRP*400: Quantum computing senior project

by Evan Chandran and Maxwell Wang

This winter ('20) at Phillips Exeter Academy we worked on a senior project in quantum computing, seeking to learn some of the theory and implications of quantum computation as well as run code on a real quantum computer. We began by studying quantum bits, gates, and circuits using David McMahon’s text Quantum Computing Explained [1]. To practice manipulating quantum bits, we used the Python quantum programming library pyQuil and the Quantum Virtual Machine (QVM), a quantum simulator developed at Rigetti Computing [2]. We simulated several quantum states such as the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) [3] state, a generalized version of a simple entangled state. We also investigated the Deutsch-Josza algorithm [4], one of the first algorithms created to demonstrate quantum advantage over a classical computer. In the last several weeks of our project, we used Rigetti’s Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) platform [5] to run code on a real Quantum Processing Unit (QPU), and documented our results.

Advisor: Jim DiCarlo

Mentor: Peter Karalekas

Running the notebooks on Binder

This is a Binder repository, meaning that the Jupyter notebooks in this repository can be run online in a preconfigured execution environment, without any need for local setup. To run the notebooks online, click the "binder" badge above or the link here, and after a few moments a Jupyter Lab interface will launch. You will then be able to run the GHZ and Deutsch-Josza notebooks from your browser via a quantum simulator running in the background!

Running the notebooks locally

If you would instead like to download the repository and run the notebooks on your own machine, you will first need to install the repository's requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, you'll need to have local qvm and quilc servers (these are installed separately -- see their READMEs for more info) running in the background:

qvm -S

quilc -R

Finally, you can bring up the JupyterLab interface by doing the following:

jupyter lab

Which should automatically open a tab in your browser, allowing you to interact with the GHZ and Deutsch-Josza notebooks.

Docker configuration

The Docker image for this repo is built using the rigetti/forest-notebook Docker image, which comes with pyQuil installed, quilc and QVM servers running in the background, and additional Python packages for data analysis and visualization. To learn more, check out the rigetti/forest-notebook repository.

References

1. McMahon, David. Quantum Computing Explained. John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
2. Robert S. Smith, Michael J. Curtis, and William J. Zeng. "A practical quantum instruction set architecture." arXiv:1608.03355 (2016).
3. Daniel M. Greenberger, Michael A. Horne, and Anton Zeilinger. "Going Beyond Bell’s Theorem." arXiv:0712.0921 (2017).
4. David Deutsch and Richard Jozsa. (1997) Rapid solution of problems by quantum computation. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 439:553–558. http://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1992.0167
5. Peter J Karalekas, Nikolas A Tezak, Eric C Peterson, Colm A Ryan, Marcus P da Silva, and Robert S Smith. A quantum-classical cloud platform optimized for variational hybrid algorithms. Quantum Sci. Technol. 5 024003 (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/2058-9565/ab7559