What is the barrier in Qiskit for?
Published in
Aug 2, 2021
The barrier, in qiskit, draws a small line separating circuits.
I always thought that the barrier was just something visual, that it didn’t change anything in the circuit.
However, in fact, the barrier serves to give an instruction to the transpiler: don’t simplify the circuit in the separating barriers.
The simplest example is two H gates in series. The H applied twice equals identity, the effects cancel out. The transpiler simply ignores the two H gates and continues the circuit.
When we put a barrier between the Hs, the transpiler is forced to consider the two H operations. The reason for this? To measure the effect of some noise introduced by gates, for example.
Besides, it helps the visualization of subcircuits.
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