QuTiP 5: The Quantum Toolbox in Python

QuTiP, the Quantum Toolbox in Python (Johansson et al., 2012, Johansson et al., 2013), has been at the forefront of open-source quantum software for the past 13 years. It is used as a research, teaching, and industrial tool, and has been downloaded millions of times by users around the world. Here we introduce the latest developments in QuTiP v5, which are set to have a large impact on the future of QuTiP and enable it to be a modern, continuously developed and popular tool for another decade and more. We summarize the code design and fundamental data layer changes as well as efficiency improvements, new solvers, applications to quantum circuits with QuTiP-QIP, and new quantum control tools with QuTiP-QOC. Additional flexibility in the data layer underlying all “quantum objects” in QuTiP allows us to harness the power of state-of-the-art data formats and packages like JAX, CuPy, and more. We explain these new features with a series of both well-known and new examples. The code for these examples is available in a static form on GitHub (https://github.com/qutip/qutip-paper-v5-examples) and as continuously updated and documented notebooks in the qutip-tutorials package (https://github.com/qutip/qutip-tutorials).