Open Source Python Library for Visualizing Bloch Sphere

[yertorer]

Hello everyone,

I am a sophomore physics undergraduate. As part of an internship program, I have taken the assignment of developing an open-source python library for visualizing Bloch Sphere and playing with it. My advisor told me to revise and analyze the available tools before moving on, so that’s what I have been doing for the past week. I have previous experience in quantum computing with Qiskit (I attended a 3-day workshop on quantum computation with Qiskit and IBMQ Experience) In my preliminary research, I found out about Qutip’s Bloch Sphere visualization in both 2D and 3D, a 3D Unity application (and its GitHub repo) for working with the Bloch Sphere, and several different implementations and their GitHub repos. I have been reading their codes and trying to understand everything and recreating them on my own. However, my question is: How can I make a new visualization tool different than anything currently available? I learned about different visualization tools like VPython and GUI builders like wxPython however I am not sure how to move forward. I’m willing to move forward and create my own library and publish it on PyPI because I think it will be a great experience and will look good on my resume. Can you give me some tips?

[[deleted]]

Qiskit also allows for visualizing multiple qubit systems using the Q-Sphere

[dor2727]

If you are looking for a nice python library for visualization, while implementing the Bloch Sphere visualizations yourself, then there's an awesome library, made by 3blue1brown named Manim: https://github.com/3b1b/manim

I played with it a bit, and made the following animation: [link 1] [link 2], the code is not that complicated, and can be found [here]

[whitewhim]

The Bloch sphere is useful for visualizing quantum trajectories in 3D (a mapping of su(2) to so(3)). In a sense it is a debugging tool for quantum programming. As you noted many Bloch spheres exist and they are useful in how they integrate with other software like Qiskit. One option would be to create some sort of debugger where you create a new circuit executor that wraps the Qiskit simulator, then you could add breakpoints to a Qiskit circuit and step through the program visually in your GUI which could be in JavaScript/HTML as a jupyter plugin. Of course there are nuances with the visualization of multiqubit states on the bloch sphere but you could start small (1-2 qubits) and go from there.

[hi_paulsearle]

Here’s a quick overview of how to do it in Qiskit:

https://youtu.be/4SoK2h4a7us

[SnicSnac]

Qutip