qcircuit

A quantum circuit drawing application.

The original website for this project may be found on the qcircuit page through the Center for Quantum Information and Control. We use the GitHub wiki pages to make more information about qcircuit available.

We welcome others to fork our project and include enhancements. See the Issues list for requested updates and features.

Installation

Dependencies

qcircuit depends on the xy-pic and ifpdf packages.

Through a TeX package manager

qcircuit has been added to the Comprehensive Tex Archive Network (CTAN), and so can be accessed through a package manager for your TeX distribution. The package name is qcircuit. Should you be inclined to do so, the source files may be downloaded from this page, though they contain all the same files available through GitHub.

How to use this manager varies from distribution to distribution; there is a Wikipedia page which describes some of the more common ways to do so.

Simple Install

The simplest way to use qcircuit is to download the file qcircuit.sty and put that file in the same folder as the tex document you are compiling. Within the document preamble, use \usepackage[options]{qcircuit} to enable TeX to compile the circuit. See the Use section of this README for more information.

More Complicated (but more helpful) Way

Note: Using a TeX package manager takes care of putting the files in the right places in your TeX tree; we recommend users no longer use the approach below, and instead use the manager.

A slightly more complicated way involves putting qcircuit in your TeX tree so that every time you compile your file TeX sees the qcircuit.sty file. This avoids the hassle of copying the file all over the place.

To do so, first locate the tex/latex subdirectory of your TeX tree. For Mac OS X users, this is located at users/user_name/Library/texmf/tex/latex/Qcircuit, where user_name is the user name you use for your login. For Windows users, this folder is located at C:\Program Files\texmf\tex\latex\Qcircuit. To update the tree, run initexmf --update-fndb from your command line.

For Linux users, one needs to locate the root TeX directory. Use the command locate:texmf to find all directories with a texmf folder. Then, after finding an appropriate folder into which qcircuit.sty can be put, execute the texhash command to update the tree.

Use

Upon successful installation, one simply calls \usepackage[options]{qcircuit} to enable circuit-drawing functionality. Currently, we provide support for two options:

• braket: This option provides the standard Dirac bras \bra{A} and kets \ket{A}
• qm: This options provides an inner product \ip{A}{B}, an outer product \op{A}{B}, a matrix element {j}{M}{k}, and an expectation value \expval{M}.

By default, none of these options are enabled, meaning if you want access to these commands, you must explicity provide them in your package call. In this way we avoid clashes with user-defined commands. For users who have defined their own commands, we welcome any feedback you may have regarding how ours are defined. Simply submit an issue and we will take a look at it.

Tutorial

A simple way to check you successfully installed qcircuit is to download the Qtutorial.tex file and run it in your favorite TeX compiler. Should the document compile correctly, you are ready to use qcircuit in your own documents! By inspecting the figures produced and comparing with the source code, you should obtain an understanding of how to typset your own circuits.

Help

A general FAQ can be found on the wiki. Questions can be emailed to user Travis-S.

License

This software is licensed under a GPLv2 license. See the corresponding documentation for a description of your rights and obligations.