yquant - Typesetting quantum circuits in a human-readable language

Abstract

After many months of intense work, you want to write down your results in a presentable way. Working in quantum information, it may well be that your paper will contain one, two, or many quantum circuits - either to quickly visualize something that is said in the main text anyway or because it is an integral part of your work. Of course, the result should look nice and embed well with the rest of your document, so you would rather not use some external tools to generate a picture. But you also don’t want to spend hours trying to bring it to the tabular form that is required by qcircuit and quantikz. In fact, it would be nice if by looking at the LaTeX source code, you could directly understand the circuit and make modifications without going back to whatever tool generated this fifty-column table. To answer these - my own - demands, I developed yquant, which allows to write quantum circuits in a human-readable language directly in LaTeX, with no external tools involved. In this talk, I will give a quick overview, demonstrate you can even use the package for your quick-and-not-dirty-at-all sketches, answer questions, and collect ideas for future features.