AQT Devices

The PennyLane-AQT plugin provides the ability for PennyLane to access devices available via Alpine Quantum Technologies’ online API.

Currently, access is available to two online simulators: an ideal and a noisy ion-trap simulator.

Ideal ion-trap simulator

This device provides an ideal noiseless ion-trap simulation. Once the plugin has been installed, you can use this device directly in PennyLane by specifying "aqt.sim":

import pennylane as qml
from pennylane_aqt import ops

dev = qml.device("aqt.sim", wires=2)

@qml.qnode(dev)
def circuit(w, x, y, z):
    qml.RX(w, wires=0)
    ops.R(x, y, wires=1)
    ops.MS(z, wires=[0,1])
    return qml.expval(qml.PauliZ(0))

Noisy ion-trap simulator

This device provides a more realistic noisy ion-trap simulation. Once the plugin has been installed, you can use this device directly in PennyLane by specifying "aqt.noisy_sim":

import pennylane as qml
from pennylane_aqt import ops

dev = qml.device("aqt.noisy_sim", wires=2)

@qml.qnode(dev)
def circuit(w, x, y, z):
    qml.RX(w, wires=0)
    ops.R(x, y, wires=1)
    ops.MS(z, wires=[0,1])
    return qml.expval(qml.PauliZ(0))

Both devices support the same set of operations. They differ only in the type of simulation they carry out (noiseless vs noisy).

AQT Operations

PennyLane-AQT provides two gates specific to AQT’s ion-trap API:

R(wires)

Two-parameter rotation gate.

MS(wires)

Mølmer-Sørenson gate.

These two gates can be imported from pennylane_aqt.ops.

Remote backend access

The user will need access credentials for the AQT platform in order to use these remote devices. These credentials should be provided to PennyLane via a configuration file or environment variable. Specifically, the variable AQT_TOKEN must contain a valid access key for AQT’s online platform.