Plaquette v2025.7.4 adds trapped-ion heating dynamics support

We are excited to announce Plaquette v2025.7.4, introducing support for modelling trapped-ion heating dynamics. This feature allows hardware teams to create more physically realistic simulations by turning the complex physics of ion heating into simulator-ready error models.

Modeling the intricate physics of trapped-ion quantum computers is a significant challenge, especially when trying to connect device-level assumptions directly to code-level reliability at scale. This release focuses on enabling robust modelling of vibrational heating in trapped-ion systems. Heating dynamics can be translated into error models using the sector framework of our fast extended-Clifford simulator, the XPauli backend. These dynamics are modelled as follows: each qubit has a probability of transitioning between phonon levels; the error rate depends on the current phonon level and typically increases as the ions heat up. This lets you study phonon-level–dependent noise at scale and quickly see how cooling rates, timings, and mitigation strategies affect overall reliability. As a result, Plaquette now provides a streamlined pathway for conducting more accurate simulations of fault-tolerant experiments in trapped-ion architectures.

Alongside, circuits produced by our circuit generator now embed qubit and detector coordinates from the underlying code, which simplifies visualisation, downstream analysis, and decoder integration. We’ve also added a 3D view for detector error models to help you inspect where and why events occur, and we aligned circuit-building behaviour with widely used conventions so that composing and extending circuits feels more consistent across tools.