Quantum circuit

A quantum circuit is a graph of quantum logic gates.

Quantum circuits are the prevailing model of quantum computing as of the 2010's - 2020's

We don't need to understand a super generalized version of tensor products to know what they mean in basic quantum computing!

Intuitively, taking a tensor product of two qubits simply means putting them together on the same quantum system/computer.

When we write the bra-ket notation: $|00⟩$ that is the same as $|0⟩\otimes |0⟩$.

The tensor product is called a "product" because it distributes over addition.

E.g. consider:

Intuitively, in this operation we just put a Hadamard gate qubit together with a second pure $|0⟩$ qubit.

And the outcome still has the second qubit as always 0, because we haven't made them interact.

The quantum state $\frac{|00⟩+|10⟩}{\sqrt{2}}$ is called a separable state, because it can be written as a single product of two different qubits. We have simply brought two qubits together, without making them interact.

If we then add a CNOT gate to make a Bell state:we can now see that the Bell state is non-separable: we've made the two qubits interact, and there is no way to write this state with a single tensor product. The qubits are fundamentally entangled.

Just like a classic programmer does not need to understand the intricacies of how transistors are implemented and CMOS semiconductors, the quantum programmer does not understand physical intricacies of the underlying physical implementation.

The main difference to keep in mind is that quantum computers cannot save and observe intermediate quantum state, so programming a quantum computer is basically like programming a combinatorial-like circuit with gates that operate on (qu)bits:

For this reason programming a quantum computer is much like programming a classical combinatorial circuit as you would do with SPICE, verilog-or-vhdl, in which you are basically describing a graph of gates that goes from the input to the output

For this reason, we can use the words "program" and "circuit" interchangeably to refer to a quantum program

Also remember that and there is no no clocks in combinatorial circuits because there are no registers to drive; and so there is no analogue of clock in the quantum system either,

Another consequence of this is that programming quantum computers does not look like programming the more "common" procedural programming languages such as C or Python, since those fundamentally rely on processor register / memory state all the time.

Quantum programmers can however use classic languages to help describe their quantum programs more easily, for example this is what happens in Qiskit, where you write a Python program that makes Qiskit library calls that describe the quantum program.