Getting Started

The tket compiler is a powerful tool for optimizing and manipulating platform-agnostic quantum circuits, focused on enabling superior performance on NISQ (noisy intermediate-scale quantum) devices. The pytket package provides an API for interacting with tket and transpiling to and from other popular quantum circuit specifications.

Pytket is compatible with 64-bit Python 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11, on Linux, MacOS (11.0 or later) and Windows. Install pytket from PyPI using:

pip install pytket

This will install the tket compiler binaries as well as the pytket package. For those using an older version of pytket, keep up to date by installing with the --upgrade flag for additional features and bug fixes.

There are separate packages for managing the interoperability between pytket and other quantum software packages which can also be installed via PyPI. For details of these, see the pytket-extensions repo.

The quantum circuit is an abstraction of computation using quantum resources, designed by initializing a system into a fixed state, then mutating it via sequences of instructions (gates).

The native circuit interface built into pytket allows us to build circuits and use them directly.

from pytket import Circuit

c = Circuit(2,2) # define a circuit with 2 qubits and 2 bits
c.H(0)           # add a Hadamard gate to qubit 0
c.Rz(0.25, 0)    # add an Rz gate of angle 0.25*pi to qubit 0
c.CX(1,0)        # add a CX gate with control qubit 1 and target qubit 0
c.measure_all()  # measure qubits 0 and 1, recording the results in bits 0 and 1

Pytket provides many handy shortcuts and higher-level components for building circuits, including custom gate definitions, circuit composition, gates with symbolic parameters, and conditional gates.

On the other hand, pytket’s flexibile interface allows you to take circuits defined in a number of languages, including raw source code languages such as OpenQASM and Quipper, or embedded python frameworks such as Qiskit and Cirq.

from pytket.qasm import circuit_from_qasm

c = circuit_from_qasm("my_qasm_file.qasm")

Or, if an extension module like pytket-qiskit is installed:

from qiskit import QuantumCircuit
from pytket.extensions.qiskit import qiskit_to_tk

qc = QuantumCircuit()
# ...
c = qiskit_to_tk(qc)

See the Pytket User Manual for an extensive tutorial on pytket, providing a gentle introduction to its features and how to run circuits on backend devices, with worked examples.