by | on 18 January 2017
Scientists at the 3. Physics Institute. of Prof. Wrachtrup at the University Stuttgart used Swabian Instrument’s Time Tagger 20 with Enthought’s Python libraries to develop feature-rich experiment control in no time. The team at the 3. Physics Institute is working on the next generation of quantum computers and quantum sensing applications using individually addressable molecular defects in diamond (find out details in their latest publications). To control and measure their fragile quantum bits, the researchers link Swabian Instrument’s Time Tagger 20 and Pulse Streamer 8/2 devices with Enthought’s open-source Traits package. Traits takes the burden of developing a GUI from you. Python scripts written with the Traits package generate their GUI automatically. Traits does this by implementing a modern model-view-controller framework in python that is smart enough to understand from a script how the GUI should look like and interact with the user. The combination of Enthought’s Traits package and Swabian Instrument’s Time Tagger 20 and Pulse Streamer 8/2 hardware has proven an extremely versatile and flexible approach to develop control and GUI for physics experiments. It has enabled short development times and minimal programming efforts. The 3. Physics Institute has named their code pi3diamond and released it under the GPL. The pi3diamond software provides implementation for confocal laser scanning microscopy, anti-bunching, FLIM, pulsed electron and nuclear spin resonance, and a set of more sophisticated quantum physics experiments, typically performed with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers in diamond.