Simulation of quantum mechanics

Welcome

The latest news from libquantum 2013-01-29 Release of libquantum 1.1.1 2010-03-20 A Rydberg quantum simulator 2008-09-09 Release of libquantum 1.1.0 and 1.0.0

libquantum is a C library for the simulation of quantum mechanics, with a special focus laid to quantum computing. It started as a pure quantum computer simulator, but support for general quantum simulation has been recently added.

Quantum computing

Based on the principles of quantum mechanics, libquantum provides an implementation of a quantum register. Basic operations for register manipulation such as the Hadamard gate or the Controlled-NOT gate are available through an easy-to-use interface. Measurements can be performed on either single qubits or the whole quantum register.

General quantum simulation

Besides quantum computing, libquantum is able to compute the time-evolution of arbitrary Hamiltonians, including time-dependent ones. This is done via numerical integration of the Schrödinger equation. Computing the time-evolution for time-independent Hamiltonians via exact diagonalization is also possible.

Features

Simulation of arbitrary quantum algorithms is possible

High performance and low memory consumption

Optional time-evolution using fourth-order Runge-Kutta or exact diagonalization, including optimizations for sparse Hamiltonians

Decoherence support for realistic quantum computation

Interface for quantum error correction (QEC)

Supports the density operator formalism

Implementations of Shor's factoring algorithm and Grover's search algorithm are included

libquantum is available as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3. See the file COPYING for further details.

Requirements

libquantum requires a C compiler with complex number support. The simulator has been reported to work on the following platforms:

GNU/Linux (This is the main development platform)

FreeBSD

OpenBSD

NetBSD

Mac OS X

HP Tru64 UNIX

AIX

Awards

Official SPEC CPU2006 benchmark

Jugend forscht Baden-Württemberg 2003 runner-up

Authors

libquantum has been written by Björn Butscher and Hendrik Weimer. The authors can be contacted at libquantum@libquantum.de.