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Extending XACC for Quantum Optimal Control...

by Thien M Nguyen, Anthony M Santana, Alexander J Mccaskey
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Journal Name
IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing & Engineering
Book Title
2020 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)
Publication Date
Page Numbers
391 to 401
Issue
1
Publisher Location
District of Columbia, United States of America
Conference Name
IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)
Conference Location
Broomfield, Colorado, United States of America
Conference Sponsor
IEEE
Conference Date
-

Quantum computing vendors are beginning to open up application programming interfaces for direct pulse-level quantum control. With this, programmers can begin to describe quantum kernels of execution via sequences of arbitrary pulse shapes. This opens new avenues of research and development with regards to smart quantum compilation routines that enable direct translation of higher-level digital assembly representations to these native pulse instructions. In this work, we present an extension to the XACC system-level quantum-classical software framework that directly enables this compilation lowering phase via user-specified quantum optimal control techniques. This extension enables the translation of digital quantum circuit representations to equivalent pulse sequences that are optimal with respect to the backend system dynamics. Our work is modular and extensible, enabling third party optimal control techniques and strategies in both C++ and Python. We demonstrate this extension with familiar gradient-based methods like gradient ascent pulse engineering (GRAPE), gradient optimization of analytic controls (GOAT), and Krotov's method. Our work serves as a foundational component of future quantum-classical compiler designs that lower high-level programmatic representations to low-level machine instructions.