We present the preliminary design and results of QVis, a visual analytics tool for exploring quantum device performance data. QV is helps uncover temporal and multivariate variations in noise properties of quantum devices. We describe the implementations of these methods as well as applications to the analysis of a 127-qubit data set derived from the IBM washington processor over a 16-month period. Both human-interactive and semi-automated analytic methods are included to address requirements for visual exploration, thresholding, and clustering techniques. Our application of QVis to real-world scenarios demonstrates the ability to reveal noteworthy patterns in the behavior of the critical characterization metrics.
We present the preliminary design and results of QVis, a visual analytics tool for exploring quantum device performance data. QV is helps uncover temporal and multivariate variations in noise properties of quantum devices. We describe the implementations of these methods as well as applications to the analysis of a 127-qubit data set derived from the IBM washington processor over a 16-month period. Both human-interactive and semi-automated analytic methods are included to address requirements for visual exploration, thresholding, and clustering techniques. Our application of QVis to real-world scenarios demonstrates the ability to reveal noteworthy patterns in the behavior of the critical characterization metrics.
Driven by potential exponential speedups in business, security, and scientific scenarios, interest in quantum computing is surging. This interest feeds the development of quantum computing hardware, but several challenges arise in optimizing application performance for hardware metrics (e.g., qubit coherence and gate fidelity). In this work, we describe a visual analytics approach for analyzing the performance properties of quantum devices and quantum circuit optimization. Our approach allows users to explore spatial and temporal patterns in quantum device performance data and it computes similarities and variances in key performance metrics. Detailed analysis of the error properties characterizing individual qubits is also supported. We also describe a method for visualizing the optimization of quantum circuits. The resulting visualization tool allows researchers to design more efficient quantum algorithms and applications by increasing the interpretability of quantum computations.
Quantum computing has entered a stage of increasing practicality. Many quantum hardware vendors such as IBM, Rigetti, Honeywell, and IonQ now enable experiments on real devices in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. These platforms show computational advantages in domains such as optimization, machine learning, and materials science. However, they remain limited by hardware noise and the absence of human-interpretable information. Existing visual metaphors, such as the Bloch Sphere for single-qubit states or circuit schematics for algorithm design, struggle to convey multi-qubit entanglement or measurement probabilities in ways accessible to human reasoning. Likewise, the rise of variational quantum circuits and quantum neural networks (QNNs) introduces new layers of opacity: how data are encoded into quantum states and how parameters evolve through training remain largely under-explored. These challenges motivate a need for visual explanation frameworks that unveil the invisible processes of quantum computing visible, interpretable, and reasonable.To address these challenges, this dissertation presents a coherent sequence of visual analytics systems that progressively enhance explainability across the hardware, state, circuit, and model layers of quantum computing. First, VACSEN supports noise-aware execution by visually correlating hardware fidelity metrics with compiled quantum circuits, allowing users to identify unstable qubits, track temporal noise evolution, and select optimal execution strategies. Second, VENUS introduces a geometric representation for quantum state visualization, combining right triangles and semicircles to jointly encode amplitude and probability information, thereby enabling intuitive exploration of superposition and entanglement beyond the traditional Bloch Sphere. Third, QuantumEyes extends interpretability to quantum circuit behavior, integrating coordinated views to reveal how quantum gates transform amplitudes and probabilities during algorithm execution (e.g., Grover’s search or the Quantum Fourier Transform). Finally, VIOLET applies visual explainability to quantum neural networks, bridging concepts from explainable AI and quantum computing. It visualizes the encoding of classical data into quantum states, tracks parameter dynamics during variational training, and exposes learned features and measurement distributions, establishing the first end-to-end system for understanding QNNs.Each system was designed through iterative co-design with quantum computing experts and evaluated through case studies, task analyses, and in-depth interviews involving researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Across evaluations, participants reported that visualization significantly enhanced their ability to reason about noise effects, understand quantum-state evolution, and interpret the learning behavior of QNNs. These findings demonstrate that visualization not only accelerates analysis and debugging but also strengthens conceptual understanding and user trust in quantum computing. To sum up, this dissertation establishes visualization
Advanced quantum computers have the capability to perform practical quantum computing to address specific problems that are intractable for classical computers. Nevertheless, these computers are susceptible to noise, leading to unexpectable errors in outcomes, which makes them less trustworthy. To address this challenge, we propose HammingVis, a visual analytics approach that helps identify and understand errors in quantum outcomes. Given that these errors exhibit latent structural patterns within Hamming space, we introduce two graph visualizations to reveal these patterns from distinct perspectives. One highlights the overall structure of errors, while the other focuses on the impact of errors within important subspaces. We further develop a prototype system for interactively exploring and discerning the correct outcomes within Hamming space. A novel design is presented to distinguish the neighborhood patterns between error and correct outcomes. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through case studies involving two classic quantum algorithms’ outcome data.
Crosstalk remains a major obstacle to building scalable and fault-tolerant quantum computers. Conventional diagnostic techniques-often based on numerical simulation or statistical modeling-struggle to scale with hardware complexity and offer limited interpretability. In this work, we present a visual analytics framework for diagnosing qubit crosstalk using lightweight, circuit-based models integrated with an interactive user interface. Our approach quantifies correlations between active and idle qubits under parameterized single- and twoqubit operations, enabling detection of both spatial and gateinduced crosstalk. The system incorporates qubit topology and gate performance data to support sector-based exploration and correlation mapping. This tool assists users in identifying correlated error sources, informing qubit placement strategies, and guiding noise-aware circuit design.
The influence of noise in quantum dynamics is one of the main factors preventing current quantum processors from performing quantum computations. Errors must be addressed, which requires a thorough understanding of the nature and interplay of different sources of noise. In this work, we propose an effective error model of single-qubit operations on the IBM Quantum Platform (IBMQP), that possesses considerable predictive power. We showcase how Quantum Noise Spectroscopy (QNS) can be used alongside other error characterization techniques to obtain a more complete error model of the system. The model allows for both Markovian and spatio-temporally correlated non-Markovian environmental and control effects. Model parameters are obtained from a small set of characterization experiments. We show that simulations using this error model are capable of accurately predicting new experimental results.
We present a method for characterizing the performance of noisy quantum processors using discrete time crystals. Deviations from ideal persistent oscillatory behavior give rise to numerical scores by which relative quantum processor capabilities can be measured. We construct small sets of qubit layouts that cover the full topology of a target system, and execute our metric over these sets on a wide range of IBM Quantum processors. We show that there is a large variability in scores, not only across multiple processors, but between different circuit layouts over individual devices. The stability of results is also examined. Our results suggest that capturing the true performance characteristics of a quantum system requires interrogation over the full device, rather than isolated subgraphs. Moreover, the disagreement between our results and other metrics indicates that benchmarks computed infrequently are not indicative of the real-world performance of a quantum processor. This method is platform agnostic, simple to implement, and scalable to any number of qubits forming a linear-chain, while simultaneously allowing for identifying ill-performing regions of a device at the individual qubit level.