Chapter 7: Simulating Quantum Computers with Aer

So far, we have mainly been running our quantum programs on our local QASM simulator, which out of the box simulates a universal error-correcting quantum computer—the type of machine that the quantum computing world expects, or at least hopes, will be a reality within the next few years.

But these amazing machines are not available yet, so in this chapter, we will explore quantum simulators both locally with Qiskit Aer and in the cloud with IBM Quantum® simulators. We will understand how to run your quantum circuits on these simulated perfect backends.

However, you can also use Qiskit Aer to simulate today's Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers by setting up noise profiles for the simulator to emulate the real IBM Quantum® hardware, with gate errors and noise. So, we will take a look at that as well.

We will also look at two other local simulator types and what you can use them for: the unitary...