PennyLane-Qiskit Plugin¶

Release:: 0.34.0-dev

The PennyLane-Qiskit plugin integrates the Qiskit quantum computing framework with PennyLane’s quantum machine learning capabilities.

PennyLane is a cross-platform Python library for quantum machine learning, automatic differentiation, and optimization of hybrid quantum-classical computations.

Qiskit is an open-source framework for quantum computing.

Once the PennyLane-Qiskit plugin is installed, the the Qiskit devices can be accessed straightaway in PennyLane, without the need to import new packages.

Devices¶

Currently, there are three different devices available:

'qiskit.aer'

Qiskit's staple simulator with great features such as noise models.

'qiskit.basicaer'

A simplified version of the Aer device, which requires fewer dependencies.

'qiskit.ibmq'

Allows integration with qiskit's hardware backends, and hardware-specific simulators.

'qiskit.ibmq.circuit_runner'

Allows integration with qiskit's circuit runner runtime program.

'qiskit.ibmq.sampler'

Allows integration with qiskit's sampler runtime program.

'qiskit.remote'

Allows integration with any qiskit backend.

For example, the 'qiskit.aer' device with two wires is called like this:

import pennylane as qml
dev = qml.device('qiskit.aer', wires=2)

Backends¶

Qiskit devices have different backends, which define which actual simulator or hardware is used by the device. Different simulator backends are optimized for different types of circuits. A backend can be defined as follows:

dev = qml.device('qiskit.aer', wires=2, backend='unitary_simulator')

PennyLane chooses the qasm_simulator as the default backend if no backend is specified. For more details on the qasm_simulator, including available backend options, see Qiskit Qasm Simulator documentation.