Representing Quantum Circuits Part One: Vectors and Matricies

I've been taking a class on Quantum Computing and I've found a lot the concepts we've learned to be really cool. In this three part series, I'll be going over the basics of Quantum Circuits and Gates. The idea of a Quantum Circuit may sound intimidating, but the basics are actually fairly simple and really interesting. Hope you enjoy!

I've created a Jupyter notebook for each part in this series(it's like a word document but for programming files). In each post I'll link both a PDF version of the notebook and a notebook file so that anyone can read about it. In order to view the notebook file itself, I would recommend using IBM's Quantum Lab. It's a free online service where you can open Jupyter Notebooks and also access specialized libraries relating to Quantum Computing. In fact, the final notebook in this series will be using a special library called Qiskit that allows you to run quantum circuits on simulators or even real quantum computers! Another option to view Jupyter Notebooks is through the Anaconda Launcher(please note that certain cells in the final notebook might only be able to run in the IBM Quantum Lab)

Setting Up an IBM Account

It's pretty easy to get started using IBM's quantum lab. After going to this website, all you have to do is sign in using google, github, etc... or you can click the link on the bottom prompting you to create a IBMid account.

Once you sign in you will be taken to a page like this:

All you have to do from there is click the launch lab button where you will finally be taken to this

 page: 

Click the upload button on the left side of the screen(circled in red here) and select the notebook file from your computer(.ipynb). Now you can run and edit the notebook for yourself!

Notebook Files

Here are the files for the first Jupyter Notebook:

PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qZRRzj963RHk_a764KvsmirRN7J-ncKP/view?usp=sharing

Jupyter Notebook(.ipynb): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k7MNXeqytTiH8I36j0nHY5glt4NeZ-ph/view?usp=sharing Note: Google may automatically open this file in Google Colab. To download the .ipynb select the 'file' option and then 'download' from the dropdown menu.