Static Analysis of Quantum Programs

Mingsheng Ying

Mingsheng Ying

Pengzhan Zhao, Xiongfei Wu, Zhuo Li +1 more

Static analysis is the process of analyzing software code without executing the software. It can help find bugs and potential problems in software that may only appear at runtime. Although many static analysis tools have been developed for classical software, due to the nature of quantum programs, these existing tools are unsuitable for analyzing quantum programs. This paper presents QChecker, a static analysis tool that supports finding bugs in quantum programs in Qiskit. QChecker consists of two main modules: a module for extracting program information based on abstract syntax tree (AST), and a module for detecting bugs based on patterns. We evaluate the performance of QChecker using the Bugs4Q benchmark. The evaluation results show that QChecker can effectively detect various bugs in quantum programs.

Shangzhou Xia, Jianjun Zhao

Quantum entanglement plays a crucial role in quantum computing. Entangling information has important implications for understanding the behavior of quantum programs and avoiding entanglement-induced errors. Entanglement analysis is a static code analysis technique that determines which qubit may entangle with another qubit and establishes an entanglement graph to represent the whole picture of interactions between entangled qubits. This paper presents the first static entanglement analysis method for quantum programs developed in the practical quantum programming language Q#. Our method first constructs an interprocedural control flow graph (ICFG) for a Q# program and then calculates the entanglement information not only within each module but also between modules of the program. The analysis results can help improve the reliability and security of quantum programs.

Mingsheng Ying

Nicola Assolini, Alessandra Di Pierro, Isabella Mastroeni

Abstract The rapid progress of quantum technologies, fostered by the efforts of both academia and industry, has stimulated the design of quantum programming languages and the development of methods to support their verification and optimization. As in the classical setting, static analysis plays a fundamental role in such an endeavour. In this paper, we provide a survey on static analysis approaches for quantum programs, which have been proposed in the literature, distinguishing between dataflow-oriented approaches, which are based on a graph representation of the program information flow, and domain-oriented approaches, which essentially consist of the definition of some appropriate abstract domains representing the program property to be analysed. To illustrate these two perspectives concretely, we also present in detail two specific analyses: a dataflow analysis for managing quantum variables and uncomputation, and a static analysis based on abstract interpretation for detecting state entanglement.