Research libraries and tools

The following document provides an ecosystem overview of how the various tools compatible with Cirq can work together to enable quantum computing research.

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  • Research Libraries and Tools: Libraries and tools used for researching new quantum algorithms and designing and preparing experiments on quantum devices.

  • Cirq: A framework specifically for programming noisy intermediate quantum computers.

  • Quantum Cloud Services: Cirq can connect to a variety of quantum cloud services. Behind each cloud service, quantum algorithms run on either a quantum processor or simulator.

  • Quantum Circuit Simulators: Cirq is compatible with a number of quantum circuit simulators that can run either locally or in a distributed fashion.

Algorithm libraries and experiments

Name Main sponsor Description
OpenFermion Google An open-source algorithms library for developing new quantum chemistry and materials simulation algorithms
TensorFlow Quantum Google An open-source algorithms library for developing new quantum machine learning algorithms
Stim Google An open-source library for high speed simulation of Clifford circuits and quantum error correction
ReCirq Google An open-source repository of example experiments, tools, and tutorials for running experiments on Google’s Quantum Computing Service
Forge QCWare A proprietary library for domain-specific quantum algorithms and applications
Pennylane Xanadu An open-source library for quantum machine learning with TensorFlow, PyTorch, or NumPy

Development tools

Name Main sponsor Description
MITIQ Unitary Fund An open-source library for error mitigation
Orquestra Zapata A proprietary workflow management tool for quantum computing
pyGSTi Sandia National Labs An open-source library for modeling and characterizing noisy quantum information processors
QUEKO UCLA An open-source tool to generate benchmarks with the known optimal solutions
tket Cambridge Quantum An open-source and platform agnostic SDK for circuit optimisation, compilation and noise mitigation
True-Q Quantum Benchmark A proprietary library for assessing and optimizing quantum hardware and algorithm performance.

Supported quantum cloud services

Company Type of Quantum Computer
Alpine Quantum Technologies Trapped ions
IonQ Trapped ions
Microsoft Azure Quantum Trapped ions (Honeywell and IonQ)
Pasqal Neutral atoms
Rigetti Superconducting qubits

For more information for vendors about integrating with cirq, see our RFC page.

High performance quantum circuit simulators

Name Main sponsor Description
qsim Google An open-source, high performance circuit simulator for Schrödinger simulations
quimb Johnny Gray An open-source, high performance circuit simulator using tensor-networks
qulacs Quansys An open-source, high performance circuit simulator for Schrödinger simulations
Stim Google An open-source library for high speed simulation of Clifford circuits and quantum error correction
cuQuantum Nvidia Tools for speeding up quantum simulation on GPUs