Qbricks

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Welcome to Qbricks

Qbricks is open-source environment for automated formal verification of quantum programs. It enables the writing of quantum circuit building programs, specified with their I/O functions and/or their resource requirements. Thanks to a characterization of quantum circuits as paramatrized path-sums, the specifications of Qbricks circuit-building quantum programs reduces to first-order proof obligations. Its host language, the Why3 deductive verification environment, provides an interface with SMT-solvers, enabling an high-level of automation in the vertfication of Qbricks specifications.

So far, Qbricks framework enabled the verified implementation of several emblematic algorithm from the litterature, including the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE), Grover search algorithm and Shor order finding (including an implementation of the oracle).

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It is developed at the CEA LIST (part of Université Paris-Saclay) in collaboration with Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles(Université Paris-Saclay).

For an introduction to Qbricks, please read our article and see the related presentation slides. A tutorial redaction is under progress.

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3 years Postdoc position, CEA Paris-Saclay, France

Formal verification for quantum programming

Keywords: quantum programming, theory of programming langages, formal methods

The CEA List, Software Security Lab (LSL), has several open internship positions in the area of formal verification for quantum programming , to begin as soon as possible at Paris-Saclay, France. The positions are 4-6 month long and can open the way to a doctoral work . They are articulated around the Qbricks tool, which aims at providing an automated solution for quantum programming formal verification.

Topic: Quantum Programming and formal verification

Host: Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, Software Security Laboratory

Place: Paris-Saclay, France

Team: Qbricks

Advisor(s): Christophe Chareton, Sébastien Bardin (first.name@cea.fr)

Context. Quantum hardware has made tremendous progress, and useful quantum machines are expected to become available in a near future. Hence, the need to design and implement adequate software tooling for the quantum case, as available in the classical computing case. Our long term goal is to design and develop formal techniques and tools enabling productive and certified quantum programming. Especially, we develop Qbricks [1,2], a proof of concept environment for formally verified quantum programming language.

Current topics. We consider the standard quantum hybrid model, where a classical program builds a quantum circuit and sends it to a quantum co-processor. In these positions, we are interested in verification mechanisms aiming at ensuring that a quantum program implementation indeed satisfies its intended behaviour. We propose the following topics:

• high-level automatic verification of quantum programs for implicit program properties,

• design of verification oriented hybrid quantum programming languages

• high-level functional reasoning for quantum programs,

• circuit-level automatic verification of quantum programs,

• verification of circuit transformation and compilation

More details on these possibilities topics will be happily provided! The list is not exhaustive, ask us if you have some project in mind.

These positions include theoretical research as well as prototyping and experimental evaluation.The results will be implemented and evaluated on QBricks, our young development and verification environment for quantum programs.

Host Institution. CEA is a leading institute in research in France and Europe. We are part of List, its 700 persons institute dedicated to digital systems. Within List, the quantum verification group is a young and emerging six person team, developping quantum static analysis/verified programming and debugguing solutions. CEA List is located in Campus Paris Saclay.

Requirements: We welcome curious and enthusiastic candidates with a solid background in Computer Science, both theoretical and practical, and a specialization in either formal methods or quantum computing (it is assumed that candidates will dedicate some of their time upgrading their skills).

Application: Applicants should send an e-mail to Christophe Chareton (christophe.chareton@cea.fr ), including CV and motivation letter.

Deadline: as soon as possible. Contact us for more information .

References

[1] Christophe Chareton and Sébastien Bardin and François Bobot and Valentin Perrelle and Benoît Valiron. An Automated Deductive Verification Framework for Circuit-building Quantum Programs Programming Languages and Systems - 30th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2021

[2] Christophe Chareton, Dongho Lee, Benoît Valiron, Renaud Vilmart, Sébastien Bardin, Zhaowei Xu: Formal Methods for Quantum Algorithms. Handb. Formal Anal. Verification Cryptogr. 2023: 319-422

[3] Matthew Amy: Towards Large-scale Functional Verification of Universal Quantum Circuits. QPL 2018: 1-21

[4] Li Zhou, Gilles Barthe, Pierre-Yves Strub, Junyi Liu, Mingsheng Ying CoqQ: Foundational Verification of Quantum Programs. POPL 2023

News

People

Name Position Affiliation Web site
Sébastien Bardin Senior CEA LIST, Université Paris-Saclay Sébastien Bardin
Benoît Valiron Senior LMF, Université Paris-Saclay Benoît Valiron
Christophe Chareton Junior CEA LIST, Université Paris-Saclay Christophe Chareton
Nicolas Blanco Postdoc CEA LIST, Université Paris-Saclay Nicolas Blanco
Nicolas Nalpon Postdoc CEA LIST, Université Paris-Saclay  
Jérôme Ricciardi PhD student CEA LIST, Université Paris-Saclay Jérôme Ricciardi
Tomas Barros Carneiro PhD student CEA LIST, Université Paris-Saclay Tomas Barros Carneiro

Publications

International conference

Book chapter

Preprint

Short articles