IBM open-source Qiskit quantum computing framework has been designed to be extensible and to support research beyond the IBM quantum systems based on superconducting qubits. The company recently added support in Qiskit for trapped ion-based quantum computing devices and enabled access to the five-qubit trapped ion device at the University of Innsbruck (UIBK) hosted by Alpine Quantum Technologies (AQT).
A Qiskit user can write a circuit once, and seamlessly execute it on IBM quantum and AQT backends. The latest Qiskit release features support for trapped ion devices via the introduction of XX-rotation (Mølmer-Sørenson -MS) gates – transpilation between superconducting and trapped ion gate sets. Any of the libraries built into Qiskit, be it for quantum applications and algorithms (Aqua), or benchmarking and noise estimation tools (Ignis), can all be developed and applied to multiple quantum computing technologies effortlessly.
