unicirc - Unitary synthesis with optimal brick wall circuits

Here we present a small Python package defining quantum circuits with a brick wall structure, providing numerical tools to check necessary conditions for their universality, and implementing variational optimization workflows to compile typical unitaries to them.

The code used to produce the data and figures in the preprint "Unitary synthesis with optimal brick wall circuits" is enclosed as well.

The repository is structured as follows:

• example_script.py provides an example usage of the most important function: unicirc.compile.
• manuscript/ contains all scripts, data and figures for the preprint. The subdirs are arranged by sections and figures
• pyproject.toml defines the Python package unicirc
• unicirc/ contains the source code for the Python package unicirc
• tests/ contains tests for the unicirc package

Installation of unicirc

The package is set up via the pyproject.toml file for installation via setuptools. It can be installed locally including its requirements via pip install . while in the top level directory of the repository.

git clone [email protected]:XanaduAI/unicirc.git
cd unicirc
pip install .

Script execution and data management

The Jupyter notebooks in manuscript/ mostly run quite quickly and therefore do not have any management of storing data to disk. Other numerics in manuscript/ are split into data generation scripts (gen_data.py) that store data in the respective data/ subdirectory, and plotting scripts (gen_fig_X.py) retrieving from the respective data/ and storing figures directly in the respective section's directory. Note that there is no test for the pre-existence of data files, numerics are just recomputed blindly. Some of the Python scripts take command line arguments. See the documentation of each respective file for details.