Welcome to pauli_tracker’s documentation!
A library to track Pauli gates through Clifford circuits.
This library is a Python wrapper around the pauli_tracker crate (Rust library).
Only the essential functionality is exposed in this wrapper, but for most use cases, this should be sufficient.
If you think something should be included in this wrapper here, please open an issue or a pull request on the GitHub repository.*
How to read this documentation
Since this is just a wrapper the documentation is very sparse and we mostly refer to the documentation of the pauli_tracker crate. It is recommended to have at least a look at the top-level documentation of the pauli_tracker crate to get an idea of what this library does.
Most methods have the identical name as their counterparts in the pauli_tracker crate (specifically, in the Tracker trait). If these methods do not have a docstring, they act exactly the same and you can find the documentation in the pauli_tracker crate (use the search bar to quickly find them).
Typing annotations and IDE support are completely missing at the moment. If the types are not documented, you can get them from the according documenation in the pauli_tracker crate, converting with the help of these conversion rules. For example, a return value of Result<T, E> in Rust becomes T on succes and raises an exception describing E on failure in Python.
When the `pauli_tracker crate`_ reaches a stable version, we will add proper documentation here (stub files maybe sooner when pyo3 can generate them automatically).
Example usage
from pauli_tracker.live.map import Live
# Pauli encoding: 0 -> I, 1 -> Z, 2 -> X, 3 -> Y
tracker = Live(3) # initialize the tracker with 3 qubits
tracker.track_x(0) # track an X Pauli on qubit 0
tracker.track_y(1) # track an Y Pauli on qubit 0
tracker.h(0) # apply a Hadamard gate on qubit 0
tracker.cx(1, 2) # apply a CNOT gate on control qubit 1 and target qubit 2
print(tracker.measure(0).tableau_encoding()) # measure qubit 0
tracker.new_qubit(4) # add a new qubit at label 4
# transform the whole opaque type into a standard Python type
print(tracker.into_py_dict_recursive())
For more examples of how the Pauli tracking works, please take a look at the Rust example code , which contains more extensive examples (although not everything is exposed in this wrapper (yet)).
Caution
For all classes we define the magic __new__ method and not the magic __init__ method (that’s what pyo3 does). However, we still define a normal __init__ method for documentation purposes (docstrings on __new__ doesn’t seem to work properly …?). This method does nothing. It is not called when constructing objects with the standard constructor syntax. However, it is called when explictily calling __init__, e.g., when doing something like super().__init__() in a subclass’ magic init. In that case, the magic __init__ method is not called, I think (but magic __new__ is still called in the subclass’ magic __init__). But all this shouldn’t matter, I hope, since both, magic __init__ and normal __init__ do nothing.
Wrapper around the essential functionality of the pauli_tracker crate. |