Piquasso: New Quantum Programming Framework Enhances Photonic Computer Simulation

Piquasso is an open-source software platform developed by a team of researchers for the simulation and programming of photonic quantum computers. The platform, which can be programmed via a Python interface, provides state-of-the-art performance in the simulation of photonic quantum computers. It also offers a web-based graphical user interface for designing quantum circuits, running computations, and visualizing results. Piquasso fills a significant gap in the market, as most existing quantum computing simulation platforms focus on qubit-based quantum computing rather than photonic quantum computation. The main goal of Piquasso is to enhance research on quantum optical computation.

What is Piquasso: A Photonic Quantum Computer Simulation Software Platform?

Piquasso is a quantum programming framework, a full-stack open-source software platform designed for the simulation and programming of photonic quantum computers. It was developed by a team of researchers from various institutions including the Quantum Computing and Quantum Information Research Group HUNREN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, the Department of Programming Languages and Compilers Eötvös Loránd University, the Center for Theoretical Physics Polish Academy of Sciences, and others.

The platform can be programmed via a high-level Python programming interface, enabling users to perform efficient quantum computing with discrete and continuous variables. It also provides state-of-the-art performance in the simulation of photonic quantum computers through optional high-performance C backends. The Piquasso framework is supported by an intuitive web-based graphical user interface where users can design quantum circuits, run computations, and visualize the results.

Why is Piquasso Important in the Quantum Computing Landscape?

In the last decade, there has been significant progress in creating quantum computer prototypes. Among the many proposals, the relevance of photonic quantum computers has increased due to recent demonstrations of possible photonic quantum advantage schemes and the development of feasible fault-tolerant quantum computation methods.

In parallel with the progress on quantum hardware prototypes, the need for quantum computer simulators and generally quantum software has been steadily increasing. Current quantum devices are still noisy, so it is instructive to compare experimental results with the ideal noiseless outcomes obtained from the simulator. Moreover, one can study with noiseless simulators the performance of new heuristic algorithms, e.g., quantum neural networks or variational quantum eigensolvers.

In addition to this, by implementing flexible noise models in the simulator, one could test the noise tolerance of quantum algorithms and evaluate the usefulness of different error mitigation or even error correction schemes. Consequently, in recent years, plenty of quantum computing simulation platforms have been developed. However, most of these focus on qubit-based quantum computing. Much less development has been done for photonic quantum computation, which is where Piquasso comes in.

How Does Piquasso Compare to Other Quantum Computing Simulation Platforms?

There are other quantum computing simulation platforms available, such as Strawberry Fields developed by Xanadu, Perceval developed by Quandela, Bosonic Qiskit, and GraphiQ. However, most of these focus on qubit-based quantum computing and less on photonic quantum computation.

Strawberry Fields is an open-source quantum programming platform built using Python, which contains a simulator and can also serve as an interface for existing hardware. Perceval is a framework for simulating optical elements, however, it does not aim to treat continuous-variable models of photonic quantum computation. Bosonic Qiskit is also capable of simulating optical elements, however, it is primarily aimed at modeling hybrid quantum computation containing both bosonic and qubit-based objects and is less emphasized for photonic systems. Finally, GraphiQ is a library dedicated to the simulation of photonic graph states, also selecting a different application domain.

Considering the narrow selection of photonic quantum computer simulators, the development of Piquasso fills a significant gap in the market.

What are the Unique Features of Piquasso?

Creating a new framework like Piquasso is beneficial for several reasons. For example, rethinking existing classical simulations might help in the development of more efficient classical algorithms. New design choices can be implemented that enable practical features different from the existing ones. In the case of Piquasso, these are the repeatability of the simulations via seeding, the increase in the simulable number of modes by the choice of Fock space truncation, and the possibility of replacing or extending default calculations via plugins.

It can also be useful to have multiple simulators testing photonic hardware. One can enable different numerical computing frameworks, such as TensorFlow or JAX.

What are the Goals of Piquasso?

The main aim with Piquasso is to enhance research on quantum optical computation by providing an accessible platform for the simulation of photonic quantum computers. On the one hand, the developers intend to provide a user-friendly and easy-to-extend system. On the other hand, they also focus on boosting the efficiency of the computations executed during the simulation.

With the development of Piquasso, the team seeks to fulfill several criteria. Speed is a key factor. In the Piquasso Boost extension, calculations of several classically computationally hard quantities are rewritten in C/C++, in order to enable more efficient computations.