Decoherence Control Research Articles

Wide-Band Unambiguous Quantum Sensing via Geodesic Evolution.

We present a quantum sensing technique that utilizes a sequence of π pulses to cyclically drive the qubit dynamics along a geodesic path of adiabatic evolution. This approach effectively suppresses the effects of both decoherence noise and control errors while simultaneously removing unwanted resonance terms, such as higher harmonics and spurious responses commonly encountered in dynamical decoupling control. As a result, our technique offers robust, wide-band, unambiguous, and high-resolution quantum sensing capabilities for signal detection and individual addressing of quantum systems, including spins. To demonstrate its versatility, we showcase successful applications of our method in both low-frequency and high-frequency sensing scenarios. The significance of this quantum sensing technique extends to the detection of complex signals and the control of intricate quantum environments. By enhancing detection accuracy and enabling precise manipulation of quantum systems, our method holds considerable promise for a variety of practical applications.

Protecting Quantum Information via Destructive Interference of Correlated Noise.

Decoherence and imperfect control are crucial challenges for quantum technologies. Common protection strategies rely on noise temporal autocorrelation, which is not optimal if other correlations are present. We develop and demonstrate experimentally a strategy that uses the cross-correlation of two noise sources. Utilizing destructive interference of cross-correlated noise extends the coherence time tenfold, improves control fidelity, and surpasses the state-of-the-art sensitivity for high frequency quantum sensing, significantly expanding the applicability of noise protection strategies.

Quantum gate-assisted teleportation in noisy environments: robustness and fidelity improvement

Quantum teleportation as the key strategy for quantum communication requires pure maximally shared entangled states among quantum nodes. In practice, quantum decoherence drastically degrades the shared entanglement during entanglement distribution, which is a serious challenge for the development of quantum networks. However, most of the decoherence control strategies proposed thus far are either resource-intensive or time-consuming. To overcome this obstacle, we enable noise-resistant teleportation through a noisy channel with a limited number of qubits and without applying time-consuming weak measurements. We apply a quantum gate control unit consisting of a controlled NOT gate and a rotation gate after the original teleportation protocol is accomplished. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a teleportation fidelity of unity is attainable when environment-assisted measurement is added to the proposed teleportation protocol via quantum gates. Moreover, we present an entanglement distribution process by employing the designed quantum gate control unit followed by the deterministic standard teleportation protocol to improve teleportation fidelity by establishing improved shared entanglement. Our performance analysis indicates that the proposed teleportation schemes offer a competitive fidelity and success probability compared with the conventional schemes and a recent weak measurement-based teleportation protocol.

Signature of quantumness in pure decoherence control

Signature of quantumness in pure decoherence control

Realizing repeated quantum error correction in a distance-three surface code.

Quantum computers hold the promise of solving computational problems that are intractable using conventional methods1. For fault-tolerant operation, quantum computers must correct errors occurring owing to unavoidable decoherence and limited control accuracy2. Here we demonstrate quantum error correction using the surface code, which is known for its exceptionally high tolerance to errors3-6. Using 17 physical qubits in a superconducting circuit, we encode quantum information in a distance-three logical qubit, building on recent distance-two error-detection experiments7-9. In an error-correction cycle taking only 1.1 μs, we demonstrate the preservation of four cardinal states of the logical qubit. Repeatedly executing the cycle, we measure and decode both bit-flip and phase-flip error syndromes using a minimum-weight perfect-matching algorithm in an error-model-free approach and apply corrections in post-processing. We find a low logical error probability of 3% per cycle when rejecting experimental runs in which leakage is detected. The measured characteristics of our device agree well with a numerical model. Our demonstration of repeated, fast and high-performance quantum error-correction cycles, together with recent advances in ion traps10, support our understanding that fault-tolerant quantum computation will be practically realizable.

Few-photon storage on a second timescale by electromagnetically induced transparency in a doped solid

We present the experimental demonstration of light storage towards the single photon level at a long storage time by electromagnetically induced transparency in a rare-earth ion-doped Pr3+:Y2SiO5 crystal. We apply decoherence control by static magnetic fields and appropriately designed radio-frequency composite pulse sequences to prolong the storage time in the memory. A rare-earth ion-doped filter crystal prepared by optical pumping serves to efficiently separate the signal at the single photon level from optical noise. Multipass setups around the memory and the filter crystal improve the storage efficiency and filter selectivity. Already without decoherence control, the setup permits storage of single photons in the microsecond regime at a storage efficiency of 42%. With decoherence control we demonstrate storage of weak coherent pulses containing some 10 photons for up to 10 s at a storage efficiency of several percent. The experimental data clearly demonstrate the applicability of EIT light storage to implement a true quantum memory in Pr3+:Y2SiO5 at long storage times. The scientific findings and technical developments are of relevance also to other protocols and media for quantum information storage.

Non-Markovian measure independent of initial states of open systems

In recent years, quantifying non-Markovian effect in open quantum system has become an important subject in the quantum decoherence control field. In this paper, a non-Markovian measure independent of the initial state of open system is proposed, thereby extending non-Markovian measure based on quantum Fisher information from the case where the initial state of the system is a pure state to the case where the initial state of the system is an arbitrary mixed state. As its application, the non-Markovian process is quantified by quantum Fisher information about a two-level system undergoing the three well-known dissipative channels, i.e. amplitude dissipative channel, phase damping channel, and random unitary channel. The results show that the conditions of non-Markovian processes in the three dissipative channels are independent of the selection of the initial state of the system by means of the quantum Fisher information of a phase parameter. Further, for amplitude dissipation channel and phase damping channel, the conditions for the non-Markovian processes to occur are equivalent to those given by trace distance, divisibility, quantum mutual information, quantum Fisher-information matrix, et al. As expected, for the case of amplitude dissipation channel, the corresponding results can reduce to the one in other paper (Lu X M, Wang X G, Sun C P <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.82.042103">2010 <i>Phys. Rev. A</i><italic/> <b>82</b> 042103</ext-link>) by selecting the initial state of the system as an optimal pure state. However, for random unitary channel, the conditions of non-Markovian process are not equivalent to those for other measures. In addition, we also obtain an interesting relationship between quantum Fisher information and quantum coherence of the open system in the three dissipative channels, namely the square of quantum <inline-formula><tex-math id="M2">\begin{document}$l_1$\end{document}</tex-math><alternatives><graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="21-20221053_M2.jpg"/><graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="21-20221053_M2.png"/></alternatives></inline-formula> coherence for the evolved state of system is exactly equal to the quantum Fisher information of the phase parameter. In a word, the obtained results not only improve the application scope of using the quantum Fisher information to detect non-Markovian effects in open systems, but also further highlight its important role in quantum information processing.

All-microwave nonadiabatic multiqubit geometric phase gate for superconducting qubits

Geometric phase gates are promising tools toward robust quantum computing owing to their robustness against certain control errors and decoherence. Here, we propose a multiqubit architecture with a nonadiabatic geometric phase gate scheme that is feasible in widely used superconducting qubit designs such as transmon and fluxonium. Through segmented microwave drive on multiple qubits coupled off-resonantly to a common resonator, the geometric phase gate is obtained from the qubit-state-dependent displacement of the resonator without fine-tuning the qubit frequencies. Fidelity above 99.99% is achieved in simulation under the available experimental parameters. Our scheme uses all-microwave control and only exploits the lowest qubit levels with long coherence time; thus it is desirable for experiments. Together with the single-qubit holonomic gates demonstrated in earlier experiments, our scheme can realize universal all-geometric quantum computing, and it also finds applications in quantum simulation with many-body interactions.

Experimental Implementation of Universal Holonomic Quantum Computation on Solid-State Spins with Optimal Control

Experimental realization of a universal set of quantum logic gates with high-fidelity is critical to quantum information processing, which is always challenging by inevitable interaction between the quantum system and environment. Geometric quantum computation is noise immune, and thus offers a robust way to enhance the control fidelity. Here, we experimentally implement the recently proposed extensible nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation with solid spins in diamond at room-temperature, which maintains both flexibility and resilience against decoherence and system control errors. Compared with previous geometric method, the fidelities of a universal set of holonomic single-qubit and two-qubit quantum logic gates are improved in experiment. Therefore, this work makes an important step towards fault-tolerant scalable geometric quantum computation in realistic systems.

Threshold for a Discrete-Variable Sensor of Quantum Reservoirs

Quantum sensing employs quantum resources of a sensor to attain a smaller estimation error of physical quantities than the limit constrained by classical physics. To measure a quantum reservoir, which is significant in decoherence control, a nonunitary-encoding sensing scheme becomes necessary. However, previous studies showed that the reservoir-induced degradation to quantum resources of the sensor makes the errors divergent with the increase of encoding time. We here propose a scheme to use $N$ two-level systems as the sensor to measure a quantum reservoir. A threshold, above which the shot-noise-limited sensing error saturates or even persistently decreases with the encoding time, is uncovered. Our analysis reveals that it is due to the formation of a bound state of the total sensor-reservoir system. Solving the outstanding error-divergency problem in previous studies, our result supplies an insightful guideline in realizing a sensitive measurement of quantum reservoirs.

Coherence-protected nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation

The authors put forward an approach to the realization of coherence-protected nonadiabatic geometric gates which have robustness against control errors and decoherence.

Advances in nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation

<p indent="0mm">Quantum computation has been shown to be superior to classical computation in solving some problems, and therefore can substantially change our life. However, the realization of quantum computation is still challenging, even if quantum technologies have been improved significantly. Two main obstacles to the realization of practical quantum computation are control errors and decoherence. Control errors are caused by inaccurate manipulations of quantum systems and decoherence is caused by the inevitable interaction between the system and its environment. Geometric phases are only dependent on evolution paths of quantum systems but independent of the evolution details and therefore quantum computation based on geometric phases, i.e., geometric quantum computation, is robust against control errors, benefiting the realization of practical quantum computation. The early proposals of geometric quantum computation are based on adiabatic geometric phases. These proposals require quantum systems to undergo adiabatic evolution, which makes quantum systems evolve for a long time. To circumvent this, nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation based on nonadiabatic Abelian geometric phases was proposed soon after. In 2012, nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation based on nonadiabatic non-Abelian geometric phases was proposed, which also circumvents long-time evolutions. Moreover, compared with nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation that uses the geometric phase as one parameter of a quantum gate, nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation uses the holonomic matrix itself as a quantum gate. This makes nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation possess whole-geometric property. Due to the merits of both geometric robustness and high-speed implementation without the limit of adiabatic evolution, nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation has been attracting much attention. Until now, much progress has been achieved in the field of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation. On one hand, various methods have been proposed to design more efficient nonadiabatic holonomic gates. Nonadiabatic holonomic gates were first realized by using resonant laser fields to drive a three-level system. After this, the single-shot proposal and the single-loop proposal were proposed, allowing us to realize one-qubit gates by a shorter path and thereby reducing the exposure time of nonadiabatic holonomic gates to the environment. To further shorten the exposure time, the path-shortening protocol was put forward, where nonadiabatic holonomic gates can be realized based on a class of extended evolution paths that are shorter than the former ones. Recently, a general approach of constructing Hamiltonians for nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation was put forward, by using which one can easily find a Hamiltonian making the quantum system evolve along a desired path so that nonadiabatic holonomic gates can be realized with an economical evolution time. On the other hand, various methods have been proposed to combine nonadiabatic holonomic gates and various decoherence-resilient methods, making the resulting schemes robust against both control errors and decoherence. The first proposal in this aspect is combining nonadiabatic holonomic gates and decoherence-free subspaces. Gradually, proposals combining nonadiabatic holonomic gates with noiseless subsystems, dynamical decoupling and surface codes were put forward. Last but not least, various proposals suitable for specific physical systems have been proposed and particularly various experimental platforms have been used to demonstrate nonadiabatic holonomic gates. This also significantly improves the development of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation. In this paper, we review the above research advances on nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation, aiming to help readers understand the main developments of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation.

Non-Markovian sensing of a quantum reservoir

Quantum sensing explores protocols using the quantum resource of sensors to achieve highly sensitive measurement of physical quantities. The conventional schemes generally use unitary dynamics to encode quantities into sensor states. In order to measure the spectral density of a quantum reservoir, which plays a vital role in controlling the reservoir-caused decoherence to microscopic systems, we propose a nonunitary-encoding optical sensing scheme. Although the nonunitary dynamics for encoding in turn degrades the quantum resource, we surprisingly find a mechanism to make the encoding time a resource to improve the precision and to make the squeezing of the sensor a resource to surpass the shot-noise limit. Our result shows that it is due to the formation of a sensor-reservoir bound state. Enriching the family of quantum sensing, our scheme gives an efficient way to measure the quantum reservoir and might supply an insightful support to decoherence control.

Non-Markovian channel from the reduced dynamics of a coin in a quantum walk

The quantum channels with memory, known as non-Markovian channels, are of crucial importance for a realistic description of a variety of physical systems, and pave ways for new methods of decoherence control by manipulating the properties of environment such as its frequency spectrum. In this work, the reduced dynamics of coin in a discrete-time quantum walk is characterized as a non-Markovian quantum channel. A general formalism is sketched to extract the Kraus operators for a $t$-step quantum walk. Non-Markovianity, in the sense of P-indivisibility of the reduced coin dynamics, is inferred from the non-monotonous behavior of distinguishably of two orthogonal states subjected to it. Further, we study various quantum information theoretic quantities of a qubit under the action of this channel, putting in perspective, the role such channels can play in various quantum information processing tasks.

Experimental quantum decoherence control by dark states of the environment

Coherent interaction of a quantum system with environment usually induces quantum decoherence. However, remarkably, in certain configurations the coherent system–environment coupling can be simultaneously explored to engineer a specific dark state of the environment that eliminates the decoherence. Here we report on experimental demonstration of such protocol for suppression of quantum decoherence by quantum decoherence itself. The protocol is based on indirect control of the environment via quantum measurements on quantum probes interacting with the environment prior to the system that should be protected. No direct manipulation with the environment is required to suppress the decoherence. In our proof-of-principle experiment, we demonstrate protection of a single qubit coupled to another single qubit. We implement the required quantum circuits with linear optics and single photons, which allows us to maintain very high degree of control and flexibility in the experiment. Our results clearly confirm the decoherence suppression achieved by the protocol and pave the way to its application to other physical platforms.

Toward the laser control of electronic decoherence.

Controlling electronic decoherence in molecules is an outstanding challenge in chemistry. Recent advances in the theory of electronic decoherence [B. Gu and I. Franco, J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 9, 773 (2018)] have demonstrated that it is possible to manipulate the rate of electronic coherence loss via control of the relative phase in the initial electronic superposition state. This control emerges when there are both relaxation and pure-dephasing channels for decoherence and applies to initially separable electron-nuclear states. In this paper, we demonstrate that (1) such an initial superposition state and the subsequent quantum control of electronic decoherence can be created via weak-field one-photon photoexcitation with few-cycle laser pulses of definite carrier envelope phase (CEP), provided the system is initially prepared in a separable electron-nuclear state. However, we also demonstrate that (2) when stationary molecular states (which are generally not separable) are considered, such one-photon laser control disappears. Remarkably, this happens even in situations in which the initially factorizable state is an excellent approximation to the stationary state with fidelity above 98.5%. The laser control that emerges for initially separable states is shown to arise because these states are superpositions of molecular eigenstates that open up CEP-controllable interference routes at the one-photon limit. Using these insights, we demonstrate that (3) the laser control of electronic decoherence from stationary states can be recovered by using a two-pulse control scheme, with the first pulse creating a vibronic superposition state and the second one inducing interference. This contribution advances a viable scheme for the laser control of electronic decoherence and exposes a surprising artifact that is introduced by widely used initially factorizable system-bath states in the field of open quantum systems.

Electrostatic Control of Phase Slips in Ti Josephson Nanotransistors

The investigation of the switching current probability distribution of a Josephson junction is a conventional tool to gain information on the phase slips dynamics as a function of the temperature. Here we adopt this well-established technique to probe the impact of an external static electric field on the occurrence of phase slips in gated all-metallic titanium (Ti) Josephson weak links. We show, in a temperature range between 20 mK and 420 mK, that the evolution of the phase slips dynamics as a function of the electrostatic field starkly differs from that observed as a function of the temperature. This fact demonstrates, on the one hand, that the electric field suppression of the critical current is not simply related to a conventional thermal-like quasiparticle overheating in the weak-link region. On the other hand, our results may open the way to operate an electrostatic-driven manipulation of phase slips in metallic Josephson nanojunctions, which can be pivotal for the control of decoherence in superconducting nanostructures.

Non-Markovian quantum dynamics: What is it good for?

Recent developments in practical quantum engineering and control techniques have allowed significant developments for experimental studies of open quantum systems and decoherence engineering. Indeed, it has become possible to test experimentally various theoretical, mathematical, and physical concepts related to non-Markovian quantum dynamics. This includes experimental characterization and quantification of non-Markovian memory effects and proof-of-principle demonstrations how to use them for certain quantum communication and information tasks. We describe here recent experimental advances for open system studies, focussing in particular to non-Markovian dynamics including the applications of memory effects, and discuss the possibilities for ultimate control of decoherence and open system dynamics.

Improving entanglement of assistance by local parity–time symmetric operation**Project supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2017M622582), the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province of China (Grant No. 2015JJ3092), the Research Foundation of Education Bureau of Hunan Province of China (Grant No. 16B177), Applied Characteristic Disciplines in Hunan Province-Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Hunan-Provincial Key Laboratory of

We investigate entanglement of assistance without and with decoherence using a local non-Hermitian operation, i.e., parity–time () symmetric operation. First we give the explicit expressions of entanglement of assistance for a general W-like state of a three-qubit system under a local parity–time symmetric operation. Then for a famous W state without decoherence, we find that entanglement of assistance shared by two parties can be obviously enhanced with the assistance of the third party by a local parity–time symmetric operation. For the decoherence case, we provide two schemes to show the effects of local parity–time symmetric operation on improvement of entanglement of assistance against amplitude damping noise. We find that for the larger amplitude damping case the scheme of symmetric operation performed on one of two parties with the influence of noise is superior to that of symmetric operation performed on the third party without the influence of noise in suppressing amplitude damping noise. However, for the smaller amplitude damping case the opposite result is given. The obtained results imply that the local symmetric operation method may have potential applications in quantum decoherence control.

Environment-assisted Quantum-enhanced Sensing with Electronic Spins in Diamond

The performance of solid-state quantum sensors based on electronic spin defects is often limited by the presence of environmental spin impurities that cause decoherence. A promising approach to improve these quantum sensors is to convert environment spins into useful resources for sensing. Here we demonstrate the efficient use of an unknown electronic spin defect in the proximity of a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond as both a quantum sensor and a quantum memory. We first experimentally evaluate the improvement in magnetic field sensing provided by mixed entangled states of the two electronic spins. Our results critically highlight the tradeoff between the advantages expected from increasing the number of spin sensors and the typical challenges associated with increasing control errors, decoherence rates, and time overheads. Still, by taking advantage of the spin defect as both a quantum sensor and a quantum memory whose state can be repetitively measured to improve the readout fidelity, we can achieve a gain in performance over the use of a single-spin sensor. These results show that the efficient use of available quantum resources can enhance quantum devices, pointing to a practical strategy towards quantum-enhanced sensing and information processing by exploiting environment spin defects.