# How to represent an ensemble of pure quantum states in Qiskit?

I was going through the Qiskit documentation to see if there was a way to represent a mixture of quantum states as a density matrix or otherwise. Is there a way to do it? If so, how?

The short answer is: no.

The long answer is that only pure states can be encoded in Qiskit. However, there are ways around this. For example, by 'purifying' the state. For example, suppose you wanted the mixture

$$\rho = p_0 |0\rangle\langle0| + p_+ |+\rangle\langle+|.$$

You could do this by creating the entangled state

$$\psi = \sqrt{p_0} |00\rangle \sqrt{p_+} |1+\rangle.$$

In this, each term represents a term from the desired mixed state. The state of the rightmost qubit in each term corresponds to one from the desired mixture. Each term has a unique state from an orthonormal basis on the left most qubit. The amplitude for each term is the square root of the corresponding probability from the mixture.

Given these properties, the reduced density matrix for the rightmost qubit behaves exactly as the desired mixed state. We just need to leave the leftmost qubit out of any gates we perform, and not measure it at the end.

Qiskit does have a density matrix class. See: qiskit-terra/qiskit/quantum_info/states/densitymatrix.py

Also see here for some usage examples like initializing from a pure state, adding, subtracting, etc.