QuTiP 5: The Quantum Toolbox in Python
Review article, 2026
QuTiP, the Quantum Toolbox in Python (Johansson et al., 2012, Johansson et al., 2013), has been at the forefront of open-source quantum software for the past 13 years. It is used as a research, teaching, and industrial tool, and has been downloaded millions of times by users around the world. Here we introduce the latest developments in QuTiP v5, which are set to have a large impact on the future of QuTiP and enable it to be a modern, continuously developed and popular tool for another decade and more. We summarize the code design and fundamental data layer changes as well as efficiency improvements, new solvers, applications to quantum circuits with QuTiP-QIP, and new quantum control tools with QuTiP-QOC. Additional flexibility in the data layer underlying all “quantum objects” in QuTiP allows us to harness the power of state-of-the-art data formats and packages like JAX, CuPy, and more. We explain these new features with a series of both well-known and new examples. The code for these examples is available in a static form on GitHub (https://github.com/qutip/qutip-paper-v5-examples) and as continuously updated and documented notebooks in the qutip-tutorials package (https://github.com/qutip/qutip-tutorials).
Quantum dynamics
Open quantum systems
Quantum Information
Open source software
Quantum biology
Author
Neill Lambert
RIKEN
Eric Giguère
Université de Sherbrooke
Paul Menczel
RIKEN
Boxi Li
Jülich Research Centre
Patrick Hopf
Technical University of Munich
RIKEN
Gerardo Suárez
University of Gdańsk
RIKEN
Marc Gali
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
Jake Lishman
IBM Research Europe
Rushiraj Gadhvi
Plaksha University
Rochisha Agarwal
RIKEN
Asier Galicia
Jülich Research Centre
Nathan Shammah
Unitary Fund France
Unitary Fund
Paul Nation
IBM
J. R. Johansson
Rakuten Group, Inc
Shahnawaz Ahmed
Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Applied Quantum Physics
Simon Cross
Zurich Instruments
Alexander Pitchford
Aberystwyth University
F. Nori
University of Michigan
RIKEN
Physics Reports
0370-1573 (ISSN)
Vol. 1153 1-62Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Software Engineering
Computer Sciences
Control Engineering
DOI
10.1016/j.physrep.2025.10.001