Quantum technologies are attracting an increased interest both in academia and industry. Multiple open-source libraries are being developed to study quantum systems, using a variety of hybrid techniques, from chemistry to machine learning.
QuTiP, the Quantum Toolbox in Python, has established itself as a major tool to aid research in quantum technology. It is used by most of the active players in the field of quantum computing, from startups to corporate research labs.
We show how QuTiP has developed an integrated environment to address challenges such as solving complex-valued ODEs and dealing with special algebras. While these are specific problems of quantum physics, the numerical approaches developed here could be of interest to the wider community.
Moreover, as projects like QuTiP scale up in size and scope, there is an ever-increasing need to incorporate the expertise of the wider scientific computing community to solve problems such as multiprocessing, parallelization, use of GPU and software development in general. This involvement can accelerate the development of the open-source tools for research in quantum technologies.