openfermion 0.1a4

Open source package for analyzing, compiling and emulating quantum algorithms for simulation of fermions.

OpenFermion is an open source effort for compiling and analyzing quantum algorithms to simulate fermionic systems, including quantum chemistry. The current version is an alpha release which features data structures and tools for obtaining and manipulating representations of fermionic Hamiltonians.

Getting started

Installing OpenFermion requires pip. Make sure that you are using an up-to-date version of it. For information about getting started beyond what is provided below please see intro and code examples. Also take a look at the ipython notebook demo as well as our detailed code documentation.

Developer install

To install the latest version of OpenFermion (in development mode):

git clone https://github.com/quantumlib/OpenFermion
cd OpenFermion
python -m pip install -e .

Library install

To install the latest PyPI release as a library (in user mode):

python -m pip install --pre --user openfermion

Plugins

In order to simulate and compile quantum circuits or perform other complicated electronic structure calculations, one can install OpenFermion plugins. We currently support a circuit simulation plugin for ProjectQ, which you can find at OpenFermion-ProjectQ. We also support electronic structure plugins for Psi4, which you can find at OpenFermion-Psi4 (recommended), and for PySCF, which you can find at OpenFermion-PySCF (less supported). For a particularly robust method of installing OpenFermion together with select plugins, we have provided a Docker image and usage instructions in the docker folder (the Docker image provides a virtual environment configured with the OpenFermion libraries pre-installed). The Docker installation can be run on any operating system (yes, even Windows).

How to contribute

We’d love to accept your contributions and patches to OpenFermion. There are a few small guidelines you need to follow. Contributions to OpenFermion must be accompanied by a Contributor License Agreement. You (or your employer) retain the copyright to your contribution, this simply gives us permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of the project. Head over to https://cla.developers.google.com/ to see your current agreements on file or to sign a new one.

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests. Furthermore, please make sure your new code comes with extensive tests! We use automatic testing to make sure all pull requests pass tests and do not decrease overall test coverage by too much. Make sure you adhere to our style guide. Just have a look at our code for clues. We mostly follow PEP 8 and use the corresponding linter to check for it. Code should always come with documentation, which is generated automatically and can be found here.

Authors

Ryan Babbush (Google), Jarrod McClean (Google), Ian Kivlichan (Harvard), Damian Steiger (ETH Zurich), Dave Bacon (Google), Yudong Cao (Harvard), Craig Gidney (Google), Thomas Haener (ETH Zurich), Vojtech Havlicek (Oxford), Zhang Jiang (NASA), Matthew Neeley (Google), Nicholas Rubin (Rigetti), Daniel Sank (Google), Kanav Setia (Dartmouth), Hannah Sim (Harvard), Wei Sun (Google) and Kevin Sung (University of Michigan).

Questions?

If you have any other questions, please contact [e-mail].

Disclaimer

Copyright 2017 The OpenFermion Developers. This is not an official Google product.