This bachelor thesis proposes a visualization system for qWard, a library for the measurement and display of metrics for quantum circuits, as a way to help developers and researchers to understand the characteristics of a specific quantum circuit's pre and post-runtime metrics. While qWard itself already has the capacity of capturing and showing metrics, this system makes our display of such metrics more immediately readable. This system intends to help the benchmarking process for different quantum algorithms when you vary factors such as noise, backend, or the design of the circuit itself, allowing for easier and faster benchmarking during development on quantum solutions.
This bachelor thesis proposes a visualization system for qWard, a library for the measurement and display of metrics for quantum circuits, as a way to help developers and researchers to understand the characteristics of a specific quantum circuit's pre and post-runtime metrics. While qWard itself already has the capacity of capturing and showing metrics, this system makes our display of such metrics more immediately readable. This system intends to help the benchmarking process for different quantum algorithms when you vary factors such as noise, backend, or the design of the circuit itself, allowing for easier and faster benchmarking during development on quantum solutions.
As quantum computing (QC) matures towards practical applications, effective methods to evaluate quantum algorithms, circuits, and execution quality in quantum software are gaining more relevance. To apply such methods, a set of meaningful metrics must be defined, understood, calculated, and applied. In an effort to solve that problem, this paper categorizes quantum related metrics into pre-runtime (derived from the static analysis of circuits before execution) and post-runtime (derived from the analysis of execution results). It is worthwhile to mention that while popular quantum SDKs such as Qiskit, PennyLane, and Q\# offer some circuit characteristics, there is often a gap between these native capabilities and the broader set of insightful pre- and post-runtime metrics in the literature. This paper introducesqWard, a Python library developed to bridge this gap by offering an initial implementation for the Qiskit SDK. qWard provides a toolkit designed to compute and visualize key pre-runtime and post-runtime metrics, facilitating the analysis of quantum algorithms. To illustrate its application, an experiment using a bell state circuit is conducted, which includes different backend configurations within the simulator as well as its execution on the IBM “torino” quantum processor. It is important to note that the initial version of qWard is limited to the Qiskit SDK and the Qiskit AER simulator.
Quantum computing is a rapidly evolving field that enables exponential speed-up over classical algorithms. At the heart of this revolutionary technology are quantum circuits, which serve as vital tools for implementing, analyzing, and optimizing quantum algorithms. Recent advancements in quantum computing and the increasing capability of quantum devices have led to the development of more complex quantum circuits. However, traditional quantum circuit diagrams suffer from scalability and readability issues, which limit the efficiency of analysis and optimization processes. In this research, we propose a novel visualization approach for large-scale quantum circuits by adopting semantic analysis to facilitate the comprehension of quantum circuits. We first exploit meta-data and semantic information extracted from the underlying code of quantum circuits to create component segmentations and pattern abstractions, allowing for easier wrangling of massive circuit diagrams. We then develop Quantivine, an interactive system for exploring and understanding quantum circuits. A series of novel circuit visualizations is designed to uncover contextual details such as qubit provenance, parallelism, and entanglement. The effectiveness of Quantivine is demonstrated through two usage scenarios of quantum circuits with up to 100 qubits and a formal user evaluation with quantum experts. A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/2m9yh/?view_only=0aa1618c97244f5093cd7ce15f1431f9.
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
Quantum computing is the basis of a new revolution. Several quantum computers are already available and, with them, quantum programming languages, quantum software development kits and platforms, quantum error correction and optimization tools are proposed and presented continuously. In connection with this, disciplines such as the Quantum Software Engineering are appearing for applying the knowledge acquired through time in their corresponding classical relatives. Besides, measurement is well known as a key factor for assessing, and improving if needed, the quality of any model in terms of, for instance, its understandability. The easier to understand a model is, the easier to maintain, reuse, etc. In this work, we present the definition of a set of metrics for assessing the understandability of quantum circuits. Some examples of the calculation of the metrics are also presented. This is just the beginning of a more thorough process in which they will be empirically validated by the performance of empirical studies, especially experiments.
QCVis is a quantum circuit visualization and education platform for novices. The rapid growth of the quantum computing field surpasses the educational capacity of existing systems, which makes novices particularly in need of accessible tools. Often, novices struggle to understand two fundamental concepts: how quantum gates affect both qubit and quantum circuit state probabilities over time. QCVis contributes two novel visualizations to develop this intuition. One visualization teaches users about the relationship between gates and single qubit probabilities. This feature integrates stacked bar charts into the traditional quantum circuit diagram to display the state probability of a single qubit after each gate application. The other visualization provides insight into the intermediate steps that contribute to the final state probability distribution. The combination of a radial bar chart and a time slider helps users see the state probability of a quantum circuit at a user-specified execution step and observe how it changes over time. We evaluated the design of QCVis in a user study with novices, who successfully used our interface to understand these key quantum computing concepts.
We present a new software package for efficient quantum circuit generation, designed to achieve optimal runtime performance. Despite being in an early stage of development, our implementation demonstrates significant advantages over existing tools. Using the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) as a benchmark, we show that our backend can generate circuits for systems with up to 2000 qubits faster than widely used frameworks such as Qiskit and Q#. This improvement is particularly relevant for applications where classical preprocessing time, including circuit generation, must be minimized to not diminish any potential quantum advantage - for example, in combinatorial optimization tasks. Additionally, our software provides high-level primitives for bit- and integer-level manipulations, offering a simplified interface for integration with high-level quantum programming languages.