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Qiskit seems to use matplotlib for rendering bloch spheres under the hood. Therefore, it would be nice if we could also make use of matplotlib's subplot technique.

I would like to implement subplots, each containing a bloch sphere (with different vectors), like the plot matrix in this example. I would be very grateful for a short help.

The result should look something like this at the end of the day:

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ Qiskit's visualization methods like plot_bloch_vector return a matplotlib figure instance. For example: fig = plt.figure(plot_bloch_vector([0,1,0])). Did you try to plot multiple figures like this? $\endgroup$ Jun 20, 2022 at 10:27
  • $\begingroup$ It sounds to be a good idea. I didn't tired that. $\endgroup$ Jun 20, 2022 at 10:37

1 Answer 1

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Function plot_bloch_vector accepts matplotlib.axes.Axes to use for rendering the bloch sphere. So, you can create a figure, add a new Axes for each bloch sphere, then pass it to plot_bloch_vector:

from qiskit.visualization import plot_bloch_vector
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D

fig = plt.figure(figsize = [6, 9])

states = [
    [1, 0, 0],
    [0, 1, 0],
    [0, 0, 1],
    [0.6, 0.8, 0],
    [0.6, 0, 0.8],
    [0, 0.6, 0.8],
]

# Values are in fractions of figure width and height:
positions = [
    [0, 0],
    [0.5, 0],
    [0, 0.333],
    [0.5, 0.333],
    [0, 0.667],
    [0.5, 0.667],
]

for m in range(len(states)):
    ax = fig.add_axes([positions[m][0], positions[m][1], 0.5, 0.333], axes_class = Axes3D)
    plot_bloch_vector(states[m], ax = ax)

The result:

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ This is exactly what I was looking for. It even allows me to use the well-known axes methods from matplotlib. Thank you! $\endgroup$ Jun 20, 2022 at 19:35

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