Qadence a differentiable interface for digital and analog programs

An older and longer version of this paper is available for free on the arXiv.

Qadence was an experiment from Pasqal creating a new quantum framework tailored to a potential unique capability of our QPUs: mixing analog and digital modes of operation in the same program. I was the original lead of the project.

Qadence is open-source, see it’s GitHub repo. We gave a talk the Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) conference in the PLanQC workshop. That, you can watch on YouTube.

The paper abstract is:

In this work we present Qadence, a high-level programming interface for building complex digital and analog quantum programs. Digital-analog quantum computing (DAQC) is an alternative paradigm for universal quantum computation combining digital gates with global analog operations acting on a register of interacting qubits. Currently, no available open-source software is tailored to express, differentiate, and execute programs within the DAQC paradigm. Qadence addresses this shortfall by seamlessly allowing the user to combine digital and analog primitives. With a flexible interface and focus on native differentiability, Qadence aims to support research in variational algorithms in these hybrid computational models.