Posted: 14th October 2024

Associate Professor Aleks Kissinger has co-authored the book ‘Picturing Quantum Software’ with John van de Wetering, an Assistant Professor in Theoretical Computer Science at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam and it is currently free for all to download.

The new book covers state of the art methods in quantum compiling, circuit optimisation, classical simulation, and fault-tolerant quantum computing using the language of the ZX-calculus. This material has been developed and taught in several courses at the University of Oxford and University of Amsterdam, notably Quantum Processes and Computation (https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2024-2025/quantum/), taught by Associate Professor Kissinger and Quantum Software (https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2023-2024/qsoft/), taught by Associate Professor Kissinger and Departmental Lecturer Stefano Gogioso. 

Associate Professor Kissinger and Assistant Professor van de Wetering designed the book to be an introduction to the ZX-calculus and quantum compilation. The themes are presented in a unique way and provide a wider perspective to help researchers understand the topics, filling a gap in the field of quantum literature. 

A few years ago, we realised that there were no introductory texts out there dedicated to "quantum compilation", i.e. the task of turning a quantum algorithm into something that is (efficiently) runnable on a real quantum computer. Associate Professor Aleks Kissinger

The pair realised that the progress that had been made in the field of quantum compilation was not accessible to non-specialists, meaning those who were just starting their careers in the field, or interested in researching the themes, were unable to access up-to-date resources. Their new book aims to address this issue, making these technical topics more accessible. 

There has been a huge amount of progress made in this area in the past 5-10 years, but it is mostly hiding in papers that can only really be read by specialists. Our new book aims to introduce some of the most important techniques in this field, while making extensive use of the ZX-calculus, a graph-based notation for quantum computing originally developed in Oxford and now used by many academic groups and quantum computing companies around the world. This makes many concepts from the literature a lot easier to teach and understand. Associate Professor Aleks Kissinger

Associate Professor Kissinger and Assistant Professor van de Wetering are looking for feedback on the book directly from the community of readers, before they send it to the publisher later this year. Once any feedback has been gathered and reflected on, it is planned to be published by Cambridge University Press. Readers can email either Associate Professor Kissinger at aleks.kissinger@cs.ox.ac.uk or Assistant Professor van de Wetering at john@vdwetering.name to provide feedback on the book. If readers find a bug, they can also leave it as an "Issue" on the github page: https://github.com/zxcalc/book/issues 

The book is free to download as it is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), meaning people are allowed to distribute copies and adapt the material, if appropriate credit to the source material is given. People must also not use the material for commercial purposes. 

You can download the pre-print for free here: https://github.com/zxcalc/book