Qiskit 0.13 release notes

0.13.0

Terra 0.10.0

Prelude

The 0.10.0 release includes several new features and bug fixes. The biggest change for this release is the addition of initial support for using Qiskit with trapped ion trap backends.

New Features

Introduced new methods in QuantumCircuit which allows the seamless adding or removing of measurements at the end of a circuit.

`measure_all()`

Adds a barrier followed by a measure operation to all qubits in the circuit. Creates a ClassicalRegister of size equal to the number of qubits in the circuit, which store the measurements.

`measure_active()`

Adds a barrier followed by a measure operation to all active qubits in the circuit. A qubit is active if it has at least one other operation acting upon it. Creates a ClassicalRegister of size equal to the number of active qubits in the circuit, which store the measurements.

`remove_final_measurements()`

Removes all final measurements and preceeding barrier from a circuit. A measurement is considered “final” if it is not followed by any other operation, excluding barriers and other measurements. After the measurements are removed, if all of the classical bits in the ClassicalRegister are idle (have no operations attached to them), then the ClassicalRegister is removed.

Examples:

# Using measure_all()
circuit = QuantumCircuit(2)
circuit.h(0)
circuit.measure_all()
circuit.draw()
 
# A ClassicalRegister with prefix measure was created.
# It has 2 clbits because there are 2 qubits to measure
 
             ┌───┐ ░ ┌─┐
     q_0: |0>┤ H ├─░─┤M├───
             └───┘ ░ └╥┘┌─┐
     q_1: |0>──────░──╫─┤M├
                   ░  ║ └╥┘
measure_0: 0 ═════════╩══╬═
                         ║
measure_1: 0 ════════════╩═
 
 
# Using measure_active()
circuit = QuantumCircuit(2)
circuit.h(0)
circuit.measure_active()
circuit.draw()
 
# This ClassicalRegister only has 1 clbit because only 1 qubit is active
 
             ┌───┐ ░ ┌─┐
     q_0: |0>┤ H ├─░─┤M├
             └───┘ ░ └╥┘
     q_1: |0>──────░──╫─
                   ░  ║
measure_0: 0 ═════════╩═
 
 
# Using remove_final_measurements()
# Assuming circuit_all and circuit_active are the circuits from the measure_all and
# measure_active examples above respectively
 
circuit_all.remove_final_measurements()
circuit_all.draw()
# The ClassicalRegister is removed because, after the measurements were removed,
# all of its clbits were idle
 
        ┌───┐
q_0: |0>┤ H ├
        └───┘
q_1: |0>─────
 
 
circuit_active.remove_final_measurements()
circuit_active.draw()
# This will result in the same circuit
 
        ┌───┐
q_0: |0>┤ H ├
        └───┘
q_1: |0>─────

Initial support for executing experiments on ion trap backends has been added.
An Rxx gate (rxx) and a global Mølmer–Sørensen gate (ms) have been added to the standard gate set.
A Cnot to Rxx/Rx/Ry decomposer cnot_rxx_decompose and a single qubit Euler angle decomposer OneQubitEulerDecomposer have been added to the quantum_info.synthesis module.
A transpiler pass MSBasisDecomposer has been added to unroll circuits defined over U3 and Cnot gates into a circuit defined over Rxx,Ry and Rx. This pass will be included in preset pass managers for backends which include the ‘rxx’ gate in their supported basis gates.
The backends in qiskit.test.mock now contain a snapshot of real device calibration data. This is accessible via the properties() method for each backend. This can be used to test any code that depends on backend properties, such as noise-adaptive transpiler passes or device noise models for simulation. This will create a faster testing and development cycle without the need to go to live backends.
Allows the Result class to return partial results. If a valid result schema is loaded that contains some experiments which succeeded and some which failed, this allows accessing the data from experiments that succeeded, while raising an exception for experiments that failed and displaying the appropriate error message for the failed results.
An ax kwarg has been added to the following visualization functions:
- qiskit.visualization.plot_histogram
- qiskit.visualization.plot_state_paulivec
- qiskit.visualization.plot_state_qsphere
- qiskit.visualization.circuit_drawer (mpl backend only)
- qiskit.QuantumCircuit.draw (mpl backend only)
This kwarg is used to pass in a matplotlib.axes.Axes object to the visualization functions. This enables integrating these visualization functions into a larger visualization workflow. Also, if an ax kwarg is specified then there is no return from the visualization functions.
An ax_real and ax_imag kwarg has been added to the following visualization functions:
- qiskit.visualization.plot_state_hinton
- qiskit.visualization.plot_state_city
These new kargs work the same as the newly added ax kwargs for other visualization functions. However because these plots use two axes (one for the real component, the other for the imaginary component). Having two kwargs also provides the flexibility to only generate a visualization for one of the components instead of always doing both. For example:
```
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from qiskit.visualization import plot_state_hinton
 
ax = plt.gca()
 
plot_state_hinton(psi, ax_real=ax)
```
will only generate a plot of the real component.

A given pass manager now can be edited with the new method replace. This method allows to replace a particular stage in a pass manager, which can be handy when dealing with preset pass managers. For example, let’s edit the layout selector of the pass manager used at optimization level 0:

from qiskit.transpiler.preset_passmanagers.level0 import level_0_pass_manager
from qiskit.transpiler.transpile_config import TranspileConfig
 
pass_manager = level_0_pass_manager(TranspileConfig(coupling_map=CouplingMap([[0,1]])))
 
pass_manager.draw()

[0] FlowLinear: SetLayout
[1] Conditional: TrivialLayout
[2] FlowLinear: FullAncillaAllocation, EnlargeWithAncilla, ApplyLayout
[3] FlowLinear: Unroller

The layout selection is set in the stage [1]. Let’s replace it with DenseLayout:

from qiskit.transpiler.passes import DenseLayout
 
pass_manager.replace(1, DenseLayout(coupling_map), condition=lambda property_set: not property_set['layout'])
pass_manager.draw()

[0] FlowLinear: SetLayout
[1] Conditional: DenseLayout
[2] FlowLinear: FullAncillaAllocation, EnlargeWithAncilla, ApplyLayout
[3] FlowLinear: Unroller

If you want to replace it without any condition, you can use set-item shortcut:

pass_manager[1] = DenseLayout(coupling_map)
pass_manager.draw()

[0] FlowLinear: SetLayout
[1] FlowLinear: DenseLayout
[2] FlowLinear: FullAncillaAllocation, EnlargeWithAncilla, ApplyLayout
[3] FlowLinear: Unroller

Introduced a new pulse command Delay which may be inserted into a pulse Schedule. This command accepts a duration and may be added to any Channel. Other commands may not be scheduled on a channel during a delay.

The delay can be added just like any other pulse command. For example:

from qiskit import pulse
from qiskit.pulse.utils import pad
 
dc0 = pulse.DriveChannel(0)
 
delay = pulse.Delay(1)
test_pulse = pulse.SamplePulse([1.0])
 
sched = pulse.Schedule()
sched += test_pulse(dc0).shift(1)
 
# build padded schedule by hand
ref_sched = delay(dc0) | sched
 
# pad schedule
padded_sched = pad(sched)
 
assert padded_sched == ref_sched

One may also pass additional channels to be padded and a time to pad until, for example:

from qiskit import pulse
from qiskit.pulse.utils import pad
 
dc0 = pulse.DriveChannel(0)
dc1 = pulse.DriveChannel(1)
 
delay = pulse.Delay(1)
test_pulse = pulse.SamplePulse([1.0])
 
sched = pulse.Schedule()
sched += test_pulse(dc0).shift(1)
 
# build padded schedule by hand
ref_sched = delay(dc0) | delay(dc1) |  sched
 
# pad schedule across both channels until up until the first time step
padded_sched = pad(sched, channels=[dc0, dc1], until=1)
 
assert padded_sched == ref_sched

Upgrade Notes

Assignments and modifications to the data attribute of qiskit.QuantumCircuit objects are now validated following the same rules used throughout the QuantumCircuit API. This was done to improve the performance of the circuits API since we can now assume the data attribute is in a known format. If you were manually modifying the data attribute of a circuit object before this may no longer work if your modifications resulted in a data structure other than the list of instructions with context in the format [(instruction, qargs, cargs)]
The transpiler default passmanager for optimization level 2 now uses the DenseLayout layout selection mechanism by default instead of NoiseAdaptiveLayout. The Denselayout pass has also been modified to be made noise-aware.

The deprecated DeviceSpecification class has been removed. Instead you should use the PulseChannelSpec. For example, you can run something like:

device = pulse.PulseChannelSpec.from_backend(backend)
device.drives[0]    # for DeviceSpecification, this was device.q[0].drive
device.memoryslots  # this was device.mem

The deprecated module qiskit.pulse.ops has been removed. Use Schedule and Instruction methods directly. For example, rather than:
```
ops.union(schedule_0, schedule_1)
ops.union(instruction, schedule)  # etc
```
Instead please use:
```
schedule_0.union(schedule_1)
instruction.union(schedule)
```
This same pattern applies to other ops functions: insert, shift, append, and flatten.

Deprecation Notes

Using the control property of qiskit.circuit.Instruction for classical control is now deprecated. In the future this property will be used for quantum control. Classically conditioned operations will instead be handled by the condition property of qiskit.circuit.Instruction.
Support for setting qiskit.circuit.Instruction parameters with an object of type qiskit.qasm.node.Node has been deprecated. Node objects that were previously used as parameters should be converted to a supported type prior to initializing a new Instruction object or calling the Instruction.params setter. Supported types are int, float, complex, str, qiskit.circuit.ParameterExpression, or numpy.ndarray.
In the qiskit 0.9.0 release the representation of bits (both qubits and classical bits) changed from tuples of the form (register, index) to be instances of the classes qiskit.circuit.Qubit and qiskit.circuit.Clbit. For backwards compatibility comparing the equality between a legacy tuple and the bit classes was supported as everything transitioned from tuples to being objects. This support is now deprecated and will be removed in the future. Everything should use the bit classes instead of tuples moving forward.
When the mpl output is used for either qiskit.QuantumCircuit.draw() or qiskit.visualization.circuit_drawer() and the style kwarg is used, passing in unsupported dictionary keys as part of the style` dictionary is now deprecated. Where these unknown arguments were previously silently ignored, in the future, unsupported keys will raise an exception.
The line length kwarg for the qiskit.QuantumCircuit.draw() method and the qiskit.visualization.circuit_drawer() function with the text output mode is deprecated. It has been replaced by the fold kwarg which will behave identically for the text output mode (but also now supports the mpl output mode too). line_length will be removed in a future release so calls should be updated to use fold instead.
The fold field in the style dict kwarg for the qiskit.QuantumCircuit.draw() method and the qiskit.visualization.circuit_drawer() function has been deprecated. It has been replaced by the fold kwarg on both functions. This kwarg behaves identically to the field in the style dict.

Bug Fixes

Instructions layering which underlies all types of circuit drawing has changed to address right/left justification. This sometimes results in output which is topologically equivalent to the rendering in prior versions but visually different than previously rendered. Fixes issue #2802
Add memory_slots to QobjExperimentHeader of pulse Qobj. This fixes a bug in the data format of meas_level=2 results of pulse experiments. Measured quantum states are returned as a bit string with zero padding based on the number set for memory_slots.
Fixed the visualization of the rzz gate in the latex circuit drawer to match the cu1 gate to reflect the symmetry in the rzz gate. The fix is based on the cds command of the qcircuit latex package. Fixes issue #1957

Other Notes

matplotlib.figure.Figure objects returned by visualization functions are no longer always closed by default. Instead the returned figure objects are only closed if the configured matplotlib backend is an inline jupyter backend(either set with %matplotlib inline or %matplotlib notebook). Output figure objects are still closed with these backends to avoid duplicate outputs in jupyter notebooks (which is why the Figure.close() were originally added).

Aer 0.3

No Change

Ignis 0.2

No Change

Aqua 0.6

No Change

IBM Q Provider 0.3

No Change

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