The survey brings together research publications and tools to examine why visualizations are created, what quantum computing subjects they address, and how those subjects are visualized.
The authors combined three methods to collect potentially relevant publications and tools: venue search, agentic search, and recursive snowballing. The scope spans quantum computing, visualization, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and software engineering.
The authors selected major journals and conferences for their relevance to visualization for quantum computing. Using official tools, they collected publications from 2015 to 2025 and added quantum computing tools referenced by those publications.
They chose this period because it covers the majority of relevant research identified in the survey and emphasizes recent work in a rapidly evolving field. Agentic search and snowballing provided routes to relevant work published before 2015.
The initial venue collection contained 41,666 publications. Keyword screening of titles, abstracts, and full text retained potentially relevant work for later manual filtering.
quantumvisual*interfaceinteract*The asterisk is a wildcard. These terms were used for broad screening before the relevance checks described below.
The authors used the deep research tools from the following services to identify publications and online tools outside the selected venues. This extended the search to work scattered across fields such as physics, education, and theoretical computer science. The authors manually checked every candidate returned by these tools.
After venue and agentic search, the authors manually reviewed related-work discussions, references, and tool documentation to expand the database. They repeated this process until it yielded no additional relevant publications or tools.
Candidate publications were summarized into overview documents using a language-model agent based on Gemini 2.5 Flash. These documents included titles, abstracts, authors, and summaries. Tool overviews drew on websites and documentation, focusing on visualization features.
The authors manually filtered candidates using three criteria. A candidate had to meet all three:
The approach or tool must present or provide visualization, including graphical interfaces, visual interactions, or plotting.
The work must target quantum computing, rather than quantum physics more broadly.
The visualization must help users work with quantum states, circuits, hardware, or algorithms, for example through analysis, debugging, or development.
These criteria exclude the opposite direction of research: using quantum computing as a computational method for tasks involving visual data.
Before excluding publications rejected by overview screening, the authors skimmed them against the same three criteria to check for errors in the generated overviews. They report finding no publications misclassified as irrelevant and no hallucinations in the overview checks.
The three collection methods and the overview checks produced the final collection of 69 core publications and tools.
The authors coded the collection in two stages. They first focused on user goals and quantum computing subjects, postponing visualization types and patterns. The manuscript explains that the small body of existing work and the many possible ways to characterize visualizations could make coding unstable if visualization categories were imposed too early.
Stage 1
Two co-authors read all overview documents and independently coded every publication and tool, initially tagging applications, purposes, quantum concepts, and domains. They used their own codes and referred to the glossary in Nielsen and Chuang for consistent quantum terminology.
They discussed these codes to reach an initial consensus, then refined the codes and categories with quantum computing expert co-authors in weekly meetings. This continued over multiple rounds until the author team reached consensus.
Stage 2
The same two authors independently coded the collection again to validate the final taxonomy. They compared assignments, discussed discrepancies, refined the coding criteria, and recoded the publications and tools until they reached consensus.
The coding establishes Usage & Purpose, which asks why a visualization is created, and Quantum Computing Subjects, which asks what it visualizes.
The third dimension asks how quantum computing subjects are visualized. The authors developed it through an analytical review of visualization techniques across the core collection, after the initial focus on purposes and subjects.
Visit Taxonomy for the category definitions and coding table. Browse the Gallery to filter publications and tools and read their details.