Minor native & sequence improvements

[alecandido]

The idea is to make it simpler to create sequences.

Currently, you have to do something like this:

qd_seq = natives.RX.create_sequence()
probe_seq = natives.MZ.create_sequence()
sequence = PulseSequence()
sequence.concatenate(qd_seq) 
sequence.concatenate(probe_seq)

(cf. conftest.py, the execute fixture)

A couple of proposals to make it simpler are:

• alias Native.create_sequence() with .__call__()
• alias PulseSequence.concatenate() with .__or__()
  • the true alias for .concatenate() will be .__ior__(), since the operation is in-place
  • but we can make s1 | s2 just by creating a new sequence:

    s = s1.copy()
    s |= s2

It should be possible to then write it like the following:

q0 = natives  # assuming they are the natives for qubit 0
sequence = q0.RX() | q0.MZ()

[stavros11]

@alecandido following the meeting last Wednesday, I understood that PulseSequence.concatenate in the last example pads the the sequence with delays so that the MZ plays after RX. However, the following example:

from qibolab import create_platform
from qibolab.sequence import PulseSequence


def sequence_print(sequence: PulseSequence):
    for ch, pulse in sequence:
        print(ch, pulse)
    print()

platform = create_platform("dummy")

q0 = platform.natives.single_qubit[0]
rx_sequence = q0.RX.create_sequence()
mz_sequence = q0.MZ.create_sequence()

sequence = PulseSequence()
sequence.concatenate(rx_sequence)
sequence.concatenate(mz_sequence)

sequence_print(rx_sequence)
sequence_print(mz_sequence)
sequence_print(sequence)

shows that there are no delays present in sequence.

I think we need to replace

qibolab/src/qibolab/sequence.py

Line 106 in 8887534

_synchronize(self, other.channels)

with

_synchronize(self, self.channels | other.channels) 

in order to get the delays.

[alecandido]

Yes, that's correct. I can add this change (and a test) in the PR that will implement this issue.

Two concatenated PulseSequence should actually start one after the other. If they need to be played in parallel (as it could be the case for different qubits) you should instead use .extend() (or the associated list operator, i.e. +, which will create a new sequence, same as | will do for .concatenate()).