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PDF (double-sided) - Physics Department, UCSB - University of ...

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Chapter 7<br />

Control S<strong>of</strong>tware – LabRAD<br />

7.1 Motivation<br />

The electronics that control the qubits are extremely complex and need to<br />

adapt very quickly for a wide variety <strong>of</strong> continuously changing experiments. This<br />

inadvertently leads to a highly involved s<strong>of</strong>tware effort to provide a meaningful<br />

user interface to the experiment. The usual approach in physics is to write one<br />

monolithic program to provide the required control. This frequently leads to a<br />

code base that becomes unmanageable very quickly, especially if multiple people<br />

are working on the same program. The general lack <strong>of</strong> formal training and programming<br />

experience in physics labs commonly leads to “quick hacks” rather than<br />

a well-structured, maintainable code base. Due to the complexity <strong>of</strong> this experi-<br />

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