Change Log#

Version 4.0#

ADDITIONS

Following additions are for the Circuit module:

  • Support for custom diagonalization.

  • Coherence time calculations for a general circuit, with the argument generate_noise_methods.

  • Ability to provide circuit parameters using physical units and multiplier prefixes.

  • Helper function hamiltonian_for_qutip_dynamics to easily simulate time dynamics for a given parameter.

  • Ability to set basis for extended variables for each subsystem individually when hierarchical diagonalization is used.

  • Can instantiate Circuit instance with a symbolic Hamiltonian.

  • Flux grouping when external flux is time dependent for superconducting loops in a circuit.

  • New info method to give a description of the Circuit instance.

  • Make certain attributes read-only, which need to be changed using the configure method.

  • Ability to change the spanning tree by defining a custom set of closure_branches.

  • The plot_wavefunction now supports options to plot the real, imaginary, absolute-square and absolute value of a wavefunction when applicable.

BUG FIXES

  • Fix diagonalization for purely harmonic systems using the Circuit module

  • Fix bugs in Circuit plotting routines.

  • Circuit module supports parallel processing.

  • Fix bugs when defining custom variable transformation in Circuit module.

  • Fix typos in ZeroPi related to custom diagonalization

  • Fixed a bug in plot_wavefunction  method Circuit , where the user-provided grids_dict argument was not applied in the plot.

UNDER THE HOOD

  • More efficient evaluation of eigenvalues for purely harmonic circuits.

  • More efficient attribute updates for the Circuit instance.

  • Using pyparsing instead of pyyaml to parse the input string for the Circuit module.

  • Initial work on making the Circuit instance writable to file.

  • Refactoring and improving code quality.

  • Improve the accuracy of _evaluate_symbolic_expr

Version 3.3#

ADDITIONS

  • The custom diagonalization module now also supports the jax library.

  • Custom diagonalization is now possible for the FullZeroPi qubit.

BUG FIXES

  • Fixed how op_in_dressed_eigenbasis sets operator dimensions.

UNDER THE HOOD

  • Initial work on QuTiP 5 compatibility

  • Initial work to allow for custom diagonalization in the Circuit module in the near future.

  • Updates on how annotations are handled in some cases.

  • Automatic generation of __all__ list in the __init__.py.

Version 3.2#

ADDITIONS

  • New diagonalization module allows users to easily customize how, and what library is used to calculate the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the various quantum systems that scqubits implements (custom Circuits and FullZeroPi are not yet supported). Both sparse and dense diagonalization procedures from libraries such as scipy, primme, and cupy (which offers GPU support), are exposed, and can be easily selected with different sets of predefined options and parameters. Completely arbitrary diagonalization functions can be also set by the user.

  • Added support for 1/f flux noise dephasing time calculation to the FluxQubit class.

  • Overhaul of the graphical user interfaces, including scqubits.GUI, scqubits.Explorer, and scqubits.HilbertSpace.create

BUG FIXES

  • Fixed a bug affecting numerical results in certain ParameterSweep cases. The problem arises in cases where the operators appearing in InteractionTerm need updating under parameter changes. (Not applicable to Transmon, TunableTransmon, or Oscillator, but relevant for Fluxonium, for example.)

  • Fixed a bug that could result in repeated Matplotlib warnings about missing fonts

  • Fixed bug that could prevent progress bar visibility settings to take effect

  • Fixed a bug that could change how the T1 coherence time due to a flux bias line was calculated in a TunableTransmon qubit.

UNDER THE HOOD

  • Removed nan checks inside

  • Added missing flux-noise support to FluxQubit

  • Docstring fixes and additions, improvements to type annotations

Version 3.1.1#

ADDITIONS

  • Enhanced support for interfacing with QuTiP/mesolve: for simulation of time evolution it is often preferable to work with matrices in the dressed eigenenergy basis (in the absence of a time-dependent drive).

  • To simplify this, all qubits (i.e., QuantumSystem children) now offer an energy_esys keyword argument, and introduce HilbertSpace.op_in_dressed_eigenbasis.

  • Add fit method Transmon.find_EJ_EC that extracts EJ, EC of a transmon, based on given E01 and anharmonicity.

  • Add E01, anharmonicity as attributes to all qubits inheriting from QubitBaseClass.

BUG FIXES

  • Fixed a bug affecting certain matrix element parameter sweeps that required recomputing of operators under parameter changes (#114 and #177).

  • Fixed a bug where energy_by_bare_index could throw an exception because np.int32 is not recognized by isinstance(myvar, int) (#172).

  • Fix for inconsistencies in global signs used for harmonic oscillator and discrete charge basis, originating in definitions of charge-basis lowering/raising operators; e^(i theta) is raising operator. Related fix in harm. osc. momentum operator sign (#166).

  • Corrected Transmon.d_hamiltonian_d_flux to account for the shift in generalized flux (#178).

  • Various GUI bug fixes.

  • Various docstring typo fixes (incl. #165).

UNDER THE HOOD

  • Renamed branch master → main.

  • Constrain changes to matplotlib settings to scqubits.

  • Account for scipy deprecation: linalg.eigh option eigvals -> subset_by_index.

  • Introduce check for existence of lookup in HilbertSpace and ParameterSweep; emit meaningful exception message otherwise.

  • Phase out HilbertSpace.subsys_list in favor of subsystem_list (#160).

  • Remove deprecated HilbertSpace.lookup interface and corresponding adapter class.

  • Distinguish preslicing reset for ParameterSweep and HilbertSpace (#170).

  • Changed pytest data for ZeroPi, FullZeroPi, Cos2Phi to account for the sign fix in 3c1c5914e41d944d8234a8cfc8f7ef2f5ae7b67e.

  • Increase required pathos version to 0.3.0 to fix the multiprocessing issue in python 3.7.

Version 3.1#

Additions

  • GUI now includes functionality to plot coherence time estimates for various qubits

Under the hood

  • Speedup for diagonalization of Transmon and TunableTransmon by recognizing the Hamiltonian matrix as tridiagonal.

Version 3.0.3#

Bug fixes for GUI

  • get_operator_names has been eliminated from the operator dropdown menu

  • “State No.” sliders for FluxQubit, ZeroPi, and Cos2PhiQubit do not exclude the ground state anymore.

  • Fixed a bug where the plot was not being erased after switching to another qubit while in manual-update mode.

  • Changing to a non-manual scqubit now switches manual-mode off.

  • Fixed a bug where the maximum state number could be larger than hilbertdim.

Under the hood

  • Initialization of a circuit instance now does not globally switch to latex output (avoids unnecessary slowdowns with regular, non-sympy, output.

Version 3.0.2#

Additions

  • Circuit now implements multiprocessing in routines like get_evals_vs_paramvals when specifying num_cpus=2 or higher as optional keyword argument.

  • The class Circuit is now “frozen” to prevent accidental creation of new instance attributes. Doing <circuit instance>.non_existing_attribute = 3 will now raise an error message instead of creating a new attribute.

  • New threshold setting scqubits.settings.SYM_INVERSION_MAX_NODES (default: =3) decides whether the capacitance matrix is inverted symbolically (number of nodes ≤ threshold) or numerically (number of nodes > threshold). This avoids apparent hang-ups due to generation of massive symbolic expressions for matrix inverses.

Bug fixes

  • Branches are now distinguished by a unique id. This solves an issue of incorrect spanning trees when two branches of the same type were connected across the same set of nodes.

  • Fixed a bug in plotting routines which led to an Exception for cases with two or more layers in the system hierarchy.

  • Fixed a bug that could break Subsystem instances when the symbolic Hamiltonian had no potential terms.

  • GUI: establish correct clearing when turning manual plot on or when switching to another plot while on manual update.

Under the hood

  • All numerical diagonalization is now delayed until explicitly required. Changing circuit parameters thus does not incur a repeated runtime cost anymore.

  • When hierarchical diagonalization is used, the bare eigensystems for each subsystems are now stored and reused for calculations, and only replaced by a new set when necessary. This dramatically improves the performance of wavefunction plotting, identity wrapping, etc.

  • If the circuit parameters are not updated, successive diagonalizations are skipped for all subsystems.

  • Implemented eigsh_safe (wrapper for scipy.sparse.linalg.eigsh) that orthogonalizes the eigenvectors when degenerate eigenvalues are detected. In rare cases of actual degeneracies in the spectrum, sparse matrix methods could have given incorrect results because scipy.sparse.linalg.eigsh does not guarantee orthogonality of eigenvectors in degenerate subspaces.

Deprecations

  • The Circuit.from_yaml method will be phased out. Instead simply use the regular instance creation method scq.Circuit(…) with the same arguments as in the from_yaml class method.

Version 3.0.1#

Additions

  • Modified SymbolicCircuit and Circuit classes to simulate linear LC circuits efficiently.

  • Added the option grids_dict to plot_wavefunction, which provides an option to define a custom grid for wavefunction plots.

  • File input/output is now functional for the Circuit class, which will enable users to store Circuit objects to file.

Bug Fixes

  • sym_external_fluxes now functions as expected for circuits with capacitive sub-circuits; external fluxes are now distributed in a deterministic way by default.

  • Fixed and improved functions that display symbolic Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, potentials, etc.; added factor 2pi for displayed external fluxes to reflect units correctly.

  • Fixed the representation of cosine operator for periodic variables which previously resulted in an erroneous shift of pi in the wavefunction plots.

  • Multiple corrections to plot functionality of Circuit class.

  • GUI: fixed issue with “update” button for slow qubits.

  • GUI: fixed bad range default for wavefunction plots of fluxonium.

Under the Hood

  • Changed the way to calculate the junction potential matrix in Circuit class, which now uses expm to evaluate the cosine terms.

  • f-strings are now used for most of the string manipulations in Circuit and SymbolicCircuit class.

  • Fixed the overall energy shift in the eigenvalues by incorporating omega/2 for every harmonic oscillator.

Version 3.0#

Additions

  • Add circuit and symbolic_circuit modules, introducing the Circuit class for symbolic and numerical analysis of custom circuits

  • Add official support for Python 3.9 and 3.10

  • Improved GUI for single qubits (incl., e.g., a Dropdown menu with parameter choices from papers)

  • Improved Explorer class

  • Additional options for specifying initial and final states in transitions and plot_transitions inside ParameterSweep

  • Additional helper functions in ParameterSweep: get_subsys(index), subsys_by_id_str(id_str), subsys_evals_count(index), dressed_evals_count

  • ParameterSweep offers a new option ignore_low_overlap

  • Improved status information output when using parallel processing of ParameterSweep data

Deprecations

  • Remove deprecation support for outdated InteractionTerm / HilbertSpace interface

  • Remove deprecation support for outdated Explorer interface

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed incorrect output/return from supported_noise_channels for the FullZeroPi qubit

  • Fixed accidental support of h5py without safeguard (remains optional)

  • Fixed ordering bug in de-serialization of OrderedDict which could prevent reading of ParameterSweep objects

  • Fixed plotting issue in which presence of nans could reduce the intended plot range

Under the Hood

  • Remove _evec_dtype attribute from qubit classes

  • Eliminated code duplication for SpectrumLookup between HilbertSpace and ParameterSweep . Both classes now use SpectrumLookupMixin

  • ParameterSweep now has read-only property hilbertspace

  • Added quantitative pytest for FullZeroPi

Version 2.2.2#

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed issue that could make import of scqubits fail when optional h5py package was not installed.

  • Plot options were not properly handled by plotting.data_vs_paramvals, leading to poor formatting of plot_dispersion_vs_paramvals

  • In certain scenarios (likely related to dependency version updates), GUI displays were duplicated rather than substituted.

  • Adjusted calculations mapping dressed-basis to bare-state labels: use (state overlap)^2 instead of (state overlap) for thresholding.

Under the Hood

typing_extensions is new dependency (used for enhanced typing annotations such as @overload and Literal

Version 2.2#

Bug Fixes

  • Use of <ParameterSweep>.plot_transitions could previously lead to a spurious switch of <ParameterSweep>[“evals”] to transition energies.

  • Include the +1/2 hbar omega term when diagonalizing fluxonium in the harmonic osc. basis. The omission of this only affected absolute energies, not the energy differences which are the relevant quantities in most cases. However, wavefunction plots for fluxonium were previously incorrectly positioned relative to the potential energy.

  • Some dispersion calculations previously failed for qubits other than Transmon and TunableTransmon.

  • Eliminated rare NamedSlotsNdarray indexing failure modes.

  • ParameterSweep previously failed for a “sweep” over just one parameter value.

  • Fixed issue where the depolarization time due to quasiparticle tunneling could be negative.

  • Fixed issue where accumulating legend label information in multiple plots to the same figure would fail to produce the desired legend.

Additions

  • Support access to Figure, Axes objects from scq.GUI().

  • Support access to Figure, Axes from ParameterSweep.plot_transitions.

  • Support multi-photon transitions in ParameterSweep.transitions() and .plot_transitions() via new keyword argument photon_number

  • Added functionality for naming quantum system instances and interaction terms via id_str at initialization. This supports easier dict-like access to objects interior to ParameterSweep. Added deepcopy option to ParameterSweep that disconnects global variables from a deep copy saved inside ParameterSweep.

  • Refactored Explorer class for usage of new ParameterSweep

  • supported_noise_channels and effective_noise_channels are now @classmethods and can be called either directly through a class, or through a class instance.

  • t1_charge_impedance is no longer returned by effective_noise_channels in the case of a TunableTransmon and Transmon qubits

  • Added about function that shows basic information about scqubits as well as versions of some of the most important libraries that scqubits relies on.

  • Extended pytests for enhanced coverage.

Deprecations

  • Old version of Explorer is still available with deprecation warning, but will be phased out in the future.

  • Deprecated omega parameter for Oscillator has been removed.

Version 2.1#

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug that overwrote <ParameterSweep>[“evals”] data with transition data when using plot_transitions().

  • Fixed proper integration of ParameterSweep into CentralDispatch, enabling proper warnings to the user when internal computed sweep data is out of sync with associated quantum system parameters.

  • Fixed a bug that could occur when a ParameterSweep was applied to a HilbertSpace object involving only a single subsystem.

Under the Hood

  • Enable use of weakref in CentralDispatch for proper garbage collection.

  • Extended pytests to basic CentralDispatch functionality

Version 2.0#

Additions

  • New graphical user interface scqubits.GUI() illustrating single-qubit functionality of scqubits.

  • Introducing NamedSlotsNdarray as a convenient subclass of ndarray with name-based and value-based slicing, and immediate support for basic plots

  • Added functionality for extracting dispersive energy parameters (such as Kerr coupling strengths)

  • Improved support for transition plots (subsystem transitions, sidebands etc.)

  • Added Cos2PhiQubit class.

  • Added KerrOscillator class

  • Added GenericQubit (two-level system) so that toy models such as the Jaynes-Cummings model can be readily realized with HilbertSpace.

  • Added n and phi operators to the Oscillator class

  • Added helper methods convert_to_E_osc and convert_to_l_osc for Oscillator initialization

  • New and enhanced interface for defining interaction terms in HilbertSpace objects via .add_interaction()

  • Added option to input interaction as a Qobj, or specify interaction terms as string expressions; also represented in HilbertSpace.create() GUI

Improvements

  • Convergence for ZeroPi is now faster, thanks to a correction to the expression for the grid spacing in discretization.py.

  • Refactored ParameterSweep class, now allowing for multi-dimensional parameter sweeps

  • Added a warning describing total=True being the default in t1 calculations

Bug fixes

  • Fix to type conversion error affecting the number operator in operators.py

  • Rectified orientation of matrix2d plots to match axes labels

  • mode option for values displayed in matrix element plots was ignored

Internals

  • New support for higher-order stencils in discretized derivatives.

  • Improved formatting of __str__ methods (called when “printing” an scqubits class instance).

  • Under the hood: use of Python 3.6 compatible type annotations; unified formatting enabled by the black package

  • Improvements to fileIO speeding up operations (increased memore cache) and requiring less disk space (avoid literal redundancies in stored data).

Version 1.3.2#

Bug fixes

  • bug fix: <qubit>.create() failed in jupyter notebooks due to missing image files

  • bug fix: corrected the form of the quasiparticle noise operator

Version 1.3.1#

Major changes/additions

  • Coherence calculations for the majority of qubits. These allow for estimating coherence times and rates due to various noise channels.

  • A new units system: users can specify energy units of their system Hamiltonian. These units are automatically considered when plotting and in coherence time calculations.

  • Separated documentation and example jupyter notebooks into individual repositories, see scqubits-doc and scqubits-examples.

Minor changes/additions

  • Introduced tests for real-valuedness of zero-pi Hamiltonians (for speedup).

  • New options in plotting (e.g. grid).

Bug fixes

  • Fixed bug preventing the proper disabling of the progress bar.

  • Various bug fixes and improvements of file IO operations.

  • Fixed issue with color legend bar in .plot_matrixelements.

Version 1.2.3#

  • Bug fix: the FullZeroPi Hamiltonian was incorrect in the case of nonzero dC.

  • improvement: thanks to adjusted ARPACK options, diagonalization should be noticeably faster for ZeroPi and FullZeroPi.

  • make pathos and dill the default for multiprocessing.

Version 1.2.2#

  • Bug fix: implementation of the add_hc=True flag in InteractionTerm involved a bug that could lead to incorrect results

  • update to plotting routines now supports various extra plotting options such as linestyle=... etc.

  • added TunableTransmon class for flux-tunable transmon, including junction asymmetry

  • limit support to Python >= 3.6

  • corrections to documentation of FullZeroPi

  • added missing jupyter notebook illustrating use of HilbertSpace and ParameterSweep

  • overhaul of file IO system now allows saving and loading various scqubit data via a custom h5 file format

  • ipywidget support for creating qubits inside jupyter (try, for example, tmon = scqubits.Transmon.create())

Version 1.2.1#

  • update to the setup script to properly include testing data with the PyPi release.

Version 1.2#

Major changes/additions

  • scqubits now offers multiprocessing support for a number of methods.

  • Introduced checks ensuring that umbrella objects like HilbertSpace and ParameterSweep instances do not accidentally go “out-of-sync” with respect to their basic components. When needed, warnings are thrown for the user to re-run sweeps or spectrum lookups.

Under the hood:

  • Monitoring for changes of interdependent class instances is implemented through a central dispatch system. (disable: settings.DISPATCH_ENABLED)

  • Removed HilbertSpace reference from within InteractionTerm (throws deprecation warning if still used)

  • Made HilbertSpace inherit from tuple rather than list; composition changes to HilbertSpace warrant generating a new HilbertSpace instance

  • Shifted InteractionTerm.hamiltonian to HilbertSpace.interaction_hamiltonian

  • Created DataStore as general purpose parent class to SpectrumData

  • No longer store custom data inside ParameterSweep, sweep_generators.py functions return DataStore objects

Version 1.1.1#

  • fixed a bug in display of FluxQubit wavefunction

  • internal refactoring

Version 1.1.0#

  • new class InteractionTerm works in tandem with HilbertSpace to ease setup of composite systems with pairwise interactions

  • new ParameterSweep class efficiently generates spectral data for performing a scan of a HilbertSpace object over an external parameters

  • new Explorer class introduces interactive plots (see docs and demo ipynb)

  • cleaned up implementation of file Serializable operations

Version 1.0.0 (first release)#