Introduction

In the verify phase, you test your quantum programs by running them on simulated devices and exploring their performance under realistic device noise models. This allows you to validate them before sending them to a physical system.

Quantum simulators can be used to help develop and test programs before fine-tuning them and sending them to quantum hardware. Local simulators can do this with good performance and efficiency.

Because the cost of classically simulating quantum circuits scales exponentially with the number of qubits, circuits that are larger than 50 qubits or so generally cannot be directly verified. For such circuits, you can:

• Test smaller versions of the circuits that can be simulated classically.
• Modify the circuits so that they become classically simulable and test these modified circuits.

Stabilizer circuits, also known as Clifford circuits, are a useful tool for accomplishing this latter goal. These are a restricted class of quantum circuits that can be efficiently simulated classically. Specialized simulators can easily simulate stabilizer circuits with thousands of qubits. See Efficient simulation of stabilizer circuits with Qiskit Aer primitives for more information.

For general quantum circuits, the following tools are available to verify your quantum programs:

• For simulating circuits when using Qiskit Runtime, use its local testing mode.
• For exact simulation of small quantum circuits, you can use the reference primitives included with Qiskit. See Exact simulation with Qiskit primitives.
• For higher-performance simulation that can handle larger circuits, or to incorporate noise models into your simulation, use Qiskit Aer(opens in a new tab), a project that is part of the Qiskit Ecosystem(opens in a new tab). See Exact and noisy simulation with Qiskit Aer primitives (V1 primitive support only). For V2 primitive support, use the Qiskit Runtime local testing mode with a Qiskit Aer backend.
• To build custom noise models, use the noise(opens in a new tab) module of Qiskit Aer. See Building noise models.