README.md

qutil

Long term goal is to gather utility functions here. It is not meant as a lightweight package. If you just want to use it you can install it via

pip install git+https://git.rwth-aachen.de/qutech/qutil.git

However, this package profits from everybody's work so please make a development install and contribute your changes. You can do this via

pip install -e git+https://git.rwth-aachen.de/qutech/qutil.git#egg=qutil

This will download the source code (i.e. clone the git repository) into a subdirectory of the ./src argument and link the files into your environment instead of copying them. If you are on windows you can use SourceTree which is a nice GUI for git. You can specify the source code directory with the --src argument (which needs to be BEFORE -e):

pip install --src some_directory/my_python_source -e git+https://git.rwth-aachen.de/qutech/qutil.git#egg=qutil

If you have already downloaded/cloned the package yourself you can use python setup.py develop or python -m pip install . -e.

qutil.plotting

cycle_plots helps you cycling through many plots with the arrow keys (there are probably much better functions for this out there) plot_2d_dataframe helps you plot 2d data frames with numeric indices get_rwth_color_cycle and the predefined rwth_color_cycle are cycler instances with the official RWTH corporate design colors:

qutil.matlab

In this module there are functions that are helpful for reading .mat files, especially those created with special measure. If you simply want to open a random .mat file you can use hdf5storage.loadmat.

Loading matlab files with "newer" MATLAB classes like table requires connecting (and starting) MATLAB instance. The function load_special_measure_with_matlab_engine can load most special measure scans by utilizing the MATLAB engine interface. To use it you require a "sufficiently new" version of MATLAB and then navigate to C:\Program Files\MATLAB\$VERSION\extern\engines\python and call python setup.py install.

qutil.const

This module defines all the constants you could wish for as well as functions to convert temperatures (convert_temperature) or between wavelengths and frequencies (lambda2nu, nu2lambda). For an overview, see the module docstring.

qutil.linalg

This module provides several handy linear algebra functions. While some are implemented elsewhere, the implementation here is typically speedier for large arrays. For example, pauli_expm exploits the fact that a matrix exponential of Pauli matrices can be written as a cosine times the identity matrix plus a sine times the Paulis to speed up the calculation.

For an overview of the included functions, see the module docstring.

qutil.ui

This module collects UI helpers, such as a progress bar for loops that can be used like so:

for i in qutil.ui.progressbar(range(n)):
    do_something()

qutil.qi

In this module there are some quantities and functions related to quantum information, like the Pauli matrices in different data types.

qutil.random

Here we collect functions for random numbers like random_hermitian to generate random Hermitian matrices.

qutil.itertools

This module contains a everything from itertools, more_itertools and custom functions.

qutil.caching

Here you find decorators, functions and classes that help you implement caching like file_cache and lru_cache. This is helpful if you need to call computationally expensive functions with the same arguments repeatedly.

qutil.io

User input related functions like query_yes_no or a CsvLogger interface (for reading use pandas.read_csv).

qutil.parallel

Functions and classes related to parallel execution i.e. multi-threading, multi-processing and asyncio. There is a class for periodic callbacks from another thread ThreadedPeriodicCallback.

qutil.hardware

This package contains little scripts to talk to various hardware devices. For example reading the leak tester via serial interface.

qutil.qcodes

Functions to convert from and to qcodes data sets. Currently only from pandas.DataFrame to qcodes.data.data_set.DataSet