qiskit-state-evolution-recorder

Simple module allowing to record animations to trace changes in qubit states for arbitrary quantum circuits.

Installation

pip install qiskit-state-evolution-recorder

Usage

from qiskit.circuit import QuantumCircuit
from qiskit_state_evolution_recorder import StateEvolutionRecorder

qc = QuantumCircuit(4)
# apply Pauli X-gate
qc.x(3)
# apply Hadamart gate
qc.h(range(4))
# apply Toffoli gate
qc.mcx(list(range(3)), 3)
# apply Hadamart gate
qc.h(range(4))
qc.measure_all()

recorder = StateEvolutionRecorder(qc, figsize=(12, 8), num_cols=4, style={'name': 'bw'})
# evolve the circuit using 120 intermediate states for each qubit
# since we have 5 fundamental states it will lead to 481 frames
recorder.evolve(120)
# with FPS of 30, the video duration will be 16.033333s
recorder.record("quantum_circuit.mp4", fps=30)

In a Jupyter notebook, you can do:

from IPython.display import Video

video = Video("quantum_circuit.mp4")
video.reload()
video

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8a3c8567-cbb8-4271-9c2c-9588130c01b0

Testing

Running Tests

The project includes both unit tests and performance tests. Performance tests can be run optionally.

# Run all tests except performance tests
python -m pytest --benchmark-skip

# Run all tests including performance tests
python -m pytest --benchmark-enable

# Run only performance tests
python -m pytest --benchmark-enable --benchmark-only

Backend Support

The library supports multiple animation backends:

• FFmpeg (default, preferred): Uses matplotlib's FuncAnimation with FFmpeg
• OpenCV: Uses OpenCV for video creation (fallback when FFmpeg is not available)

The system automatically selects the best available backend. To install additional backends:

# Install OpenCV backend
pip install opencv-python

# Install FFmpeg (system-dependent)
# Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
# macOS: brew install ffmpeg
# Windows: Download from https://ffmpeg.org/download.html