VENUS: A Geometrical Representation for Quantum State Visualization

Shaolun Ruan , Ribo Yuan , Qiang Guan , Yanna Lin , Ying Mao , Weiwen Jiang , Zhepeng Wang , Wei Xu , Yong Wang

The visual design of VENUS which supports single-qubit (A) and two-qubit (B) state representation based on the same visualization form. Line segments visualize the state vector, where the black line denotes the real part, and the grey line denotes the imaginary part. Semicircles’s area indicates the probability of measuring the corresponding state. Triangle base’s length consistently equals to 1, because it encodes based on the constraint of normalization.

Description

Visualizations have played a crucial role in helping quantum computing users explore quantum states in various quantum computing applications. Among them, Bloch Sphere is the widely used visualization for showing quantum states, which leverages angles to represent quantum amplitudes. However, it cannot support the visualization of quantum entanglement and superposition, the two essential properties of quantum computing. To address this issue, we propose VENUS, a novel visualization for quantum state representation. By explicitly correlating 2D geometric shapes based on the math foundation of quantum computing characteristics, VENUS effectively represents quantum amplitudes of both the single qubit and two qubits for quantum entanglement. Also, we use multiple coordinated semicircles to naturally encode probability distribution, making the quantum superposition intuitive to analyze. We conducted two well-designed case studies and an in-depth expert interview to evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of VENUS. The result shows that VENUS can effectively facilitate the exploration of quantum states for the single qubit and two qubits.

System

You can access the online visual analytics system via this link.
(A monitor with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 is preferred.)

Materials

PDF |Appendix | Dataset

Publication

Shaolun Ruan, Ribo Yuan, Qiang Guan, Yanna Lin, Ying Mao, Weiwen Jiang, Zhepeng Wang, Wei Xu, Yong Wang. 2023. VENUS: A Geometrical Representation for Quantum State Visualization. Computer Graphics Forum. https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.1111/cgf14827. To Appear.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Lee Kong Chian Fellowship awarded to Dr. Yong Wang by SMU. Qiang Guan was supported by NSF 2212465, 2230111, 2217021 and 2238734.