IonQ API Circuits

To run against the IonQ API, you must construct circuits that are valid for the service. In other words, not every cirq.Circuit that you can construct will be able to run on the IonQ API, either against hardware or on the IonQ simulator. Here we describe the restrictions on these circuits.

In this section we assume a cirq_ionq.Service object has been instantiated and is called service and cirq and cirq_ionq have been imported:

import cirq
import cirq_ionq as ionq
service = ionq.Service()

See IonQ API Service for how to set up the service.

Qubits

The qubits used for circuits run against the IonQ API must be made cirq.LineQubits. Line qubits are identified by a unique integer identifier. The number in the cirq.LineQubit does not generically refer to the position of the ion in a chain, as the API may decide to run your algorithm on different qubits than the number you specify. This integer number must be between zero and the number of qubits on the device minus one, inclusively. To get the number of qubits on the device, you can query the calibration:

calibration = service.get_current_calibration()
num_qubits = calibration.num_qubits()
print(num_qubits)

A useful way to generate a set of cirq.LineQubits is to use the range method on this class, which functions similar to Python's native range. For example to create three qubits, with indices 0, 1, and 2 you can do

q0, q1, q2 = cirq.LineQubit.range(3)

API Gates

The IonQ API supports a set of gates via the API. Circuits written with these gates can be run directly on the API without modifying the circuit. If the circuit has gates that are not in the this API gate set, then you must transpile these circuits into the API gate set.

The API gate for the IonQ device is given by

Here is a nonsense quantum circuit constructed from these API gates, demonstrating how to use these gates.

q0, q1, q2 = cirq.LineQubit.range(3)
circuit = cirq.Circuit(
    cirq.X(q0)**0.5, cirq.Y(q1)**0.5, cirq.Z(q2)**0.25, # Pauli Pow gates
    cirq.X(q0), cirq.Y(q1), cirq.Z(q2), # Pauli gates
    cirq.rx(0.1)(q0), cirq.ry(0.1)(q1), cirq.rz(0.1)(q2), # Single qubit rotations
    cirq.H(q1), # Special case of Hadamard
    cirq.CNOT(q0, q1), cirq.SWAP(q2, q1), # Controlled-not and its SWAP cousin
    cirq.XX(q0, q1)**0.2, cirq.YY(q1, q2)**0.2, cirq.ZZ(q2, q0)**0.2, # MS gates
    cirq.measure(q0, key='x'), # Single qubit measurement
    cirq.measure(q1, q2, key='y') # Two qubit measurement
)
print(circuit)

which is the circuit

0: ───X^0.5───X───Rx(0.032π)───────@───────XX────────────────ZZ───────M('x')───
                                                           
1: ───Y^0.5───Y───Ry(0.032π)───H───X───×───XX^0.2───YY───────┼────────M('y')───
                                                                   
2: ───T───────Z───Rz(0.032π)───────────×────────────YY^0.2───ZZ^0.2───M────────

Measurement

For the IonQ API, measurement is currently only supported if the measurement is at the end of the circuit. Measurement gates have keys which are then used to batch the results via this key. For example above we see that there are two keys, one for measuring the first qubit and one for measuring the second and third qubit.

Support for general one and two qubit gates.

If you have a circuit with gates outside of the API native gates, you will need to convert these gates into the native gates. For the case in which these gates are one or two qubit gates which support the unitary protocol (i.e. which support calling cirq.unitary on the gate produces the unitary for the gate), there is support for compiling these into API supported gates. This conversion may not be optimal, but it does produce a valid API circuit.

This support is given by the cirq_ionq.IonQAPIDevice and its decompose_operation method. On way to use this is to pass the device to a circuit, and these decompositions will be automatically applied while the circuit is being constructed: python

q0 = cirq.LineQubit(0)
device = ionq.IonQAPIDevice([q0])
circuit = cirq.Circuit(device=device)
circuit.append(cirq.H(q0)**0.2) # Non-API gate
print(circuit)

which produces

0: ───Z^(1/14)───X^0.14───Z^(1/14)───

Note that the decomposition changes with the cirq.Moment structure of the circuit.

Next steps

How to use the service API

Get information about QPUs from IonQ calibrations