balloon_qnet

Repository containing NetSquid simulator of balloon-based quantum networks including downlink, uplink and horizontal free-space channels.

Article

The article assosciated to this repository can be currently found on arXiv, under the name Free-space model for balloon-based quantum networks (arXiv:2412.03356).

If you are planning to use this code or data in your research, please cite:

@misc{karakostaamarantidou2024freespacemodelballoonbasedquantum,
      title={Free-space model for a balloon-based quantum network}, 
      author={Ilektra Karakosta-Amarantidou and Raja Yehia and Matteo Schiavon},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2412.03356},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={quant-ph},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03356}, 
}

Installation

balloon_qnet uses the NetSquid Python package. To install and use NetSquid, you need to first create an account.

For the calculation of the atmospheric transmittance over the link, balloon_qnet contains a pre-compiled version of the lowtran-piccia package.

Please take note that both NetSquid and lowtran-piccia only work on Linux and MacOS. For Windows users it is recommended to use a virtual machine like Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

For WSL, you can either use directly the terminal (we recommend Windows Terminal) or the Visual Studio code extension. For visualizing plots, you may also install the tkinter package:

apt install python3-tk

Steps

To install balloon_qnet from the source, you first have to clone this repository and then we recomment to create a virtual environment with the appropriate version of Python (the current version of the package has been tested and should be usable for Python versions 3.12.3 and above). Specifically, you have to run the following:

git clone https://github.com/RajaYehia/balloon_qnet
cd balloon_qnet
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install --extra-index-url https://<username>:<password>@pypi.netsquid.org -e .

where username and password are your NetSquid credentials.

Structure

This is the main structure of this repository:

balloon_qnet/
├── .gitignore
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── pyproject.toml
├── spherical_earth.png
├── balloon_qnet/
├── data/
├── Plot files/
└── Studies/

In particular:

• balloon_qnet contains the source code of the package, including the necessary modules and the compiled version of lowtran-piccia.
• Studies has the scripts used to generate the different scenarios presented in the paper.
• Data contains the data included in the paper, which are the outputs of the scripts in .txt format.
• Plot files are the scripts used to generate the plots in the paper for each scenario considered.

Contributors

Ilektra Karakosta-Amarantidou - University of Padova - ilektra.karakostaamarantidou@unipd.it
Raja Yehia - ICFO - raja.yehia@icfo.eu
Matteo Schiavon - LIP6 (Sorbonne University) - matteo.schiavon@lip6.fr

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.