The Quantum Recipe

Fred Jendrzejewski, Selim Jochim

In this first lecture we will review the foundations of quantum mechanics at the level of a cooking recipe. This will enable us to use them later for the discussion of the atomic structure and interaction between atoms and light.

Tim Folger

Alex Wilkins

M. S. Ramkarthik, Payal D. Solanki

This chapter contains recipes of all the major quantum gates used in performing various quantum information tasks. It also has some useful recipes on the construction of N qubit computational basis, N qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, N qubit W states, two-qubit Bell states, N qubit generalized Werner states. Apart from that, entropy and its quantification by various measures like Shannon entropy, linear and Relative entropy are given. It becomes very important in quantum information theory to know the closeness between two quantum states and to this end, recipes related to trace distance, fidelity, super fidelity, Bures distance. The chapter ends with two important recipes which are for computing the expectation values of observables and the quantum mechanical single qubit measurements.

Alexa Keating

Gerald Enrique Nelson Mc Kenzie

The Quantum Cookbook: Recipes for Programming Real Qubits is a hands-on programming book that teaches working engineers how to write and run real quantum circuits on real quantum hardware. Organized as 19 recipes that build on each other — from a first "Hello, Qubit" circuit through entanglement (Bell and GHZ states), quantum teleportation, superdense coding, Grover's search, the Quantum Fourier Transform and Shor's algorithm, VQE, and QAOA — the book treats quantum programming the way a culinary cookbook treats cooking: each recipe lists its ingredients (qubits, gates, classical bits), walks through the method step by step, shows the code in two languages side by side, and ends with tasting notes on what the result means. Every recipe is presented in both Qiskit (IBM's Python SDK) and OpenQASM 3.0 (the standardized assembly-level language), and runs on the IBM Quantum Platform via the SamplerV2 and EstimatorV2 primitives, with 10 minutes of free real-hardware time per month on the Open Plan. Unlike a traditional textbook, the book assumes the reader is an engineer, not a physicist, and grounds every concept in runnable code: qubits as 2-dimensional complex vectors, gates as unitary matrices, and multi-qubit states as tensor products are the four math tools the recipes use and nothing more. A math primer, API reference, OpenQASM 3.0 reference, glossary, and citation appendix support the recipes, while dedicated chapters on error mitigation, logical qubits and the fault-tolerance roadmap, and the state of the field in 2026 keep the focus firmly on what runs on a real QPU today and what will run on one tomorrow. Released under the Apache 2.0 License (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21863658), it is written for anyone who wants to move past toy simulators and start programming real qubits.