Protected quantum computing: interleaving gate operations with dynamical decoupling sequences

Controlling NMR spin systems for quantum computation

Nuclear magnetic resonance is arguably both the best available quantum technology for implementing simple quantum computing experiments and the worst technology for building large scale quantum computers that has ever been seriously put forward. After a few years of rapid growth, leading to an implementation of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm in a seven-spin system, the field started to reach its natural limits and further progress became challenging. Rather than pursuing more complex algorithms on larger systems, interest has now largely moved into developing techniques for the precise and efficient manipulation of spin states with the aim of developing methods that can be applied in other more scalable technologies and within conventional NMR. However, the user friendliness of NMR implementations means that they remain popular for proof-of-principle demonstrations of simple quantum information protocols.

Charging Quantum Batteries via Indefinite Causal Order: Theory and Experiment

In the standard quantum theory, the causal order of occurrence between events is prescribed, and must be definite. This has been maintained in all conventional scenarios of operation for quantum batteries. In this study we take a step further to allow the charging of quantum batteries in an indefinite causal order (ICO). We propose a nonunitary dynamics-based charging protocol and experimentally investigate this using a photonic quantum switch. Our results demonstrate that both the amount of energy charged and the thermal efficiency can be boosted simultaneously. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive effect that a relatively less powerful charger guarantees a charged battery with more energy at a higher efficiency. Through investigation of different charger configurations, we find that ICO protocol can outperform the conventional protocols and gives rise to the anomalous inverse interaction effect. Our findings highlight a fundamental difference between the novelties arising from ICO and other coherently controlled processes, providing new insights into ICO and its potential applications.

Surpassing spectator qubits with photonic modes and continuous measurement for Heisenberg-limited noise mitigation

Noise is an ever-present challenge to the creation and preservation of fragile quantum states. Recent work suggests that spatial noise correlations can be harnessed as a resource for noise mitigation via the use of spectator qubits to measure environmental noise. In this work we generalize this concept from spectator qubits to a spectator mode: a photonic mode which continuously measures spatially correlated classical dephasing noise and applies a continuous correction drive to frequency-tunable data qubits. Our analysis shows that by using many photon states, spectator modes can surpass many of the quantum measurement constraints that limit spectator qubit approaches. We also find that long-time data qubit dephasing can be arbitrarily suppressed, even for white noise dephasing. Further, using a squeezing (parametric) drive, the error in the spectator mode approach can exhibit Heisenberg-limited scaling in the number of photons used. We also show that spectator mode noise mitigation can be implemented completely autonomously using engineered dissipation. In this case no explicit measurement or processing of a classical measurement record is needed. Our work establishes spectator modes as a potentially powerful alternative to spectator qubits for noise mitigation.

Quantum Simulation of the Shortcut to the Adiabatic Passage Using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Quantum adiabatic shortcut technology provides a technique to accelerate the quantum adiabatic process and has been widely used in various fields of quantum information processing. In this work, we proposed a two-level quantum shortcut adiabatic passage model. Then, exploiting the nuclear magnetic resonance, we experimentally simulated the dynamics of quantum shortcut adiabatic passage using the water molecules.

Fast Quantum State Tomography in the Nitrogen Vacancy Center of Diamond

Quantum state tomography is the procedure for reconstructing unknown quantum states from a series of measurements of different observables. Depending on the physical system, different sets of observables have been used for this procedure. In the case of spin qubits, the most common procedure is to measure the transverse magnetization of the system as a function of time. Here, we present a different scheme that relies on time-independent observables and therefore does not require measurements at different evolution times, thereby greatly reducing the overall measurement time. To recover the full density matrix, we use a set of unitary operations that transform the density operator elements into the directly measurable observable. We demonstrate the performance of this scheme in the electron-nuclear spin system of the nitrogen vacancy center in diamond.

Toward the Speed Limit of High-Fidelity Two-Qubit Gates

Most implementations of quantum gate operations rely on external control fields to drive the evolution of the quantum system. Generating these control fields requires significant efforts to design the suitable control Hamiltonians. Furthermore, any error in the control fields reduces the fidelity of the implemented control operation with respect to the ideal target operation. Achieving sufficiently fast gate operations at low error rates remains therefore a huge challenge. In this Letter, we present a novel approach to overcome this challenge by eliminating, for specific gate operations, the time-dependent control fields entirely. This approach appears useful for maximizing the speed of the gate operation while simultaneously eliminating relevant sources of errors. We present an experimental demonstration of the concept in a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond at room temperature.

Implementing efficient selective quantum process tomography of superconducting quantum gates on IBM quantum experience

The experimental implementation of selective quantum process tomography (SQPT) involves computing individual elements of the process matrix with the help of a special set of states called quantum 2-design states. However, the number of experimental settings required to prepare input states from quantum 2-design states to selectively and precisely compute a desired element of the process matrix is still high, and hence constructing the corresponding unitary operations in the lab is a daunting task. In order to reduce the experimental complexity, we mathematically reformulated the standard SQPT problem, which we term the modified SQPT (MSQPT) method. We designed the generalized quantum circuit to prepare the required set of input states and formulated an efficient measurement strategy aimed at minimizing the experimental cost of SQPT. We experimentally demonstrated the MSQPT protocol on the IBM QX2 cloud quantum processor and selectively characterized various two- and three-qubit quantum gates.

Quantum Information and Algorithms for Correlated Quantum Matter

Discoveries in quantum materials, which are characterized by the strongly quantum-mechanical nature of electrons and atoms, have revealed exotic properties that arise from correlations. It is the promise of quantum materials for quantum information science superimposed with the potential of new computational quantum algorithms to discover new quantum materials that inspires this Review. We anticipate that quantum materials to be discovered and developed in the next years will transform the areas of quantum information processing including communication, storage, and computing. Simultaneously, efforts toward developing new quantum algorithmic approaches for quantum simulation and advanced calculation methods for many-body quantum systems enable major advances toward functional quantum materials and their deployment. The advent of quantum computing brings new possibilities for eliminating the exponential complexity that has stymied simulation of correlated quantum systems on high-performance classical computers. Here, we review new algorithms and computational approaches to predict and understand the behavior of correlated quantum matter. The strongly interdisciplinary nature of the topics covered necessitates a common language to integrate ideas from these fields. We aim to provide this common language while weaving together fields across electronic structure theory, quantum electrodynamics, algorithm design, and open quantum systems. Our Review is timely in presenting the state-of-the-art in the field toward algorithms with nonexponential complexity for correlated quantum matter with applications in grand-challenge problems. Looking to the future, at the intersection of quantum information science and algorithms for correlated quantum matter, we envision seminal advances in predicting many-body quantum states and describing excitonic quantum matter and large-scale entangled states, a better understanding of high-temperature superconductivity, and quantifying open quantum system dynamics.

Efficient Implementation of a Quantum Algorithm in a Single Nitrogen-Vacancy Center of Diamond

Quantum computers have the potential to speed up certain problems that are hard for classical computers. Hybrid systems, such as the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond, are among the most promising systems to implement quantum computing, provided the control of the different types of qubits can be efficiently implemented. In the case of the NV center, the anisotropic hyperfine interaction allows one to control the nuclear spins indirectly, through gate operations targeting the electron spin, combined with free precession. Here, we demonstrate that this approach allows one to implement a full quantum algorithm, using the example of Grover's quantum search in a single NV center, whose electron is coupled to a carbon nuclear spin.

Efficient Quantum Gates for Individual Nuclear Spin Qubits by Indirect Control

Hybrid quantum registers, such as electron-nuclear spin systems, have emerged as promising hardware for implementing quantum information and computing protocols in scalable systems. Nevertheless, the coherent control of such systems still faces challenges. Particularly, the lower gyromagnetic ratios of the nuclear spins cause them to respond slowly to control fields, resulting in gate times that are generally longer than the coherence time of the electron. Here, we demonstrate a scheme for circumventing this problem by indirect control: we apply a small number of short pulses only to the electron and let the full system undergo free evolution under the hyperfine coupling between the pulses. Using this scheme, we realize robust quantum gates in an electron-nuclear spin system, including a Hadamard gate on the nuclear spin and a controlled-NOT gate with the nuclear spin as the target qubit. The durations of these gates are shorter than the electron coherence time, and thus additional operations to extend the system coherence time are not needed. Our demonstration serves as a proof of concept for achieving efficient coherent control of electron-nuclear spin systems, such as nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond. Our scheme is still applicable when the nuclear spins are only weakly coupled to the electron.

Quantum fidelity measures for mixed states

Applications of quantum technology often require fidelities to quantify performance. These provide a fundamental yardstick for the comparison of two quantum states. While this is straightforward in the case of pure states, it is much more subtle for the more general case of mixed quantum states often found in practice. A large number of different proposals exist. In this review, we summarize the required properties of a quantum fidelity measure, and compare them, to determine which properties each of the different measures has. We show that there are large classes of measures that satisfy all the required properties of a fidelity measure, just as there are many norms of Hilbert space operators, and many measures of entropy. We compare these fidelities, with detailed proofs of their properties. We also summarize briefly the applications of these measures in teleportation, quantum memories and quantum computers, quantum communications, and quantum phase-space simulations.

Single-spin magnetic resonance in the nitrogen-vacancy center of diamond

Magnetic resonance of single spins has flourished mostly because of the unique properties of the NV center in diamond. This review covers the basic physics of this defect center, introduces the techniques for working with single spins and gives an overview of some applications like quantum information and sensing.

A dressed spin qubit in silicon

Coherent dressing of a quantum two-level system provides access to a new quantum system with improved properties-a different and easily tunable level splitting, faster control and longer coherence times. In our work we investigate the properties of the dressed, donor-bound electron spin in silicon, and assess its potential as a quantum bit in scalable architectures. The two dressed spin-polariton levels constitute a quantum bit that can be coherently driven with an oscillating magnetic field, an oscillating electric field, frequency modulation of the driving field or a simple detuning pulse. We measure coherence times of and , one order of magnitude longer than those of the undressed spin. Furthermore, the use of the dressed states enables coherent coupling of the solid-state spins to electric fields and mechanical oscillations.

Experimental fault-tolerant universal quantum gates with solid-state spins under ambient conditions

Quantum computation provides great speedup over its classical counterpart for certain problems. One of the key challenges for quantum computation is to realize precise control of the quantum system in the presence of noise. Control of the spin-qubits in solids with the accuracy required by fault-tolerant quantum computation under ambient conditions remains elusive. Here, we quantitatively characterize the source of noise during quantum gate operation and demonstrate strategies to suppress the effect of these. A universal set of logic gates in a nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond are reported with an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 0.999952 and two-qubit gate fidelity of 0.992. These high control fidelities have been achieved at room temperature in naturally abundant ¹³C diamond via composite pulses and an optimized control method.

High fidelity manipulation of diamond-based spin qubits is difficult at room temperature because of decoherence. Here, the authors show a universal set of logic gates in nitrogen-vacancy centres with average single-qubit and two-qubit gate fidelities of 0.999952 and 0.992, respectively.

Experimental protection of two-qubit quantum gates against environmental noise by dynamical decoupling

Hybrid systems consisting of different types of qubits are promising for building quantum computers if they combine useful properties of their constituent qubits. However, they also pose additional challenges if one type of qubits is more susceptible to environmental noise than the others. Dynamical decoupling can help to protect such systems by reducing the decoherence due to the environmental noise, but the protection must be designed such that it does not interfere with the control fields driving the logical operations. Here, we test such a protection scheme on a quantum register consisting of the electronic and nuclear spins of a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. The results show that processing is compatible with protection: The dephasing time was extended almost to the limit given by the longitudinal relaxation time of the electron spin.