A self-contained approach to studying the unitary evolution of coupled qubits is introduced, capable of addressing a variety of physical systems described by exchange Hamiltonians containing Rabi terms. The method automatically determines both the Weyl chamber steering trajectory and the accompanying local rotations. Particular attention is paid to the case of anisotropic exchange with tracking controls, which is solved analytically. It is shown that, if computational subspace is well isolated, any exchange interaction can always generate high fidelity, single-step controlled-NOT (CNOT) logic, provided that both qubits can be individually manipulated. The results are then applied to superconducting qubit architectures, for which several CNOT gate implementations are identified. The paper concludes with consideration of two CNOT gate designs having high efficiency and operating with no significant leakage to higher-lying noncomputational states.
A self-contained approach to studying the unitary evolution of coupled qubits is introduced, capable of addressing a variety of physical systems described by exchange Hamiltonians containing Rabi terms. The method automatically determines both the Weyl chamber steering trajectory and the accompanying local rotations. Particular attention is paid to the case of anisotropic exchange with tracking controls, which is solved analytically. It is shown that, if computational subspace is well isolated, any exchange interaction can always generate high fidelity, single-step controlled-NOT (CNOT) logic, provided that both qubits can be individually manipulated. The results are then applied to superconducting qubit architectures, for which several CNOT gate implementations are identified. The paper concludes with consideration of two CNOT gate designs having high efficiency and operating with no significant leakage to higher-lying noncomputational states.
Building on the previous results of the Weyl chamber steering method, we demonstrate how to generate high-fidelity controlled-NOT (CNOT) gates by direct application of certain physically relevant Hamiltonians with fixed coupling constants containing Rabi terms. Such Hamiltonians are often used to describe two superconducting qubits driven by local rf pulses. It is found that in order to achieve 100% fidelity in a system with capacitive coupling of strength g, one Rabi term suffices. We give the exact values of the physical parameters needed to implement such CNOT gates. The gate time and all possible Rabi frequencies are found to be $t=\ensuremath{\pi}∕(2g)$ and ${\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{1}∕g=\sqrt{64{n}^{2}\ensuremath{-}1},n=1,2,3,\dots{}$. Generation of a perfect CNOT gate in a system with inductive coupling, characterized by additional constant k, requires the presence of both Rabi terms. The gate time is again $t=\ensuremath{\pi}∕(2g)$, but now there is an infinite number of solutions, each of which is valid in a certain range of k and is characterized by a pair of integers (n,m), $\frac{{\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{1,2}}{g}=\sqrt{16{n}^{2}\ensuremath{-}{(\frac{k\ensuremath{-}1}{2})}^{2}}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\sqrt{16{m}^{2}\ensuremath{-}{(\frac{k+1}{2})}^{2}}$. We distinguish two cases, depending on the sign of the coupling constant: (i) the antiferromagnetic case $(k\ensuremath{\geqslant}0)$ with $n\ensuremath{\geqslant}m=0,1,2,\dots{}$ and (ii) the ferromagnetic case $(k\ensuremath{\leqslant}0)$ with n>m=0,1,2,…. We conclude with consideration of fidelity degradation by switching to resonance. Simulation of time evolution based on the fourth-order Magnus expansion reveals characteristics of the gate similar to those found in the exact case, with slightly shorter gate time and shifted values of the Rabi frequencies.
Superconducting qubits with tunable coupling are ideally suited for fast and accurate implementation of quantum logic. Here we present a simple approach, based on Weyl chamber steering, to CNOT gate design for inductively coupled phase qubits with tunable coupling strength g. In the presence of simultaneous rf pulses on the individual qubits that appropriately track the coupling strength as it is varied, we show that an infinite family of switching sequences preserving the time integral or "area" of g can be used to generate CNOT logic. We demonstrate our approach by considering time-dependencies most likely to be used in actual implementations: trapezoidal, sine, and soft quartic (also known as Landau's hat).
We demonstrate how using two-qubit composite rotations a high fidelity controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate can be constructed, even when the strength of the interaction between qubits is not accurately known. We focus on the exchange interaction oscillation in silicon based solid-state architectures with a Heisenberg Hamiltonian. This method easily applies to a general two-qubit Hamiltonian. We show how the robust CNOT gate can achieve a very high fidelity when a single application of the composite rotations is combined with a modest level of Hamiltonian characterization. Operating the robust CNOT gate in a suitably characterized system means concatenation of the composite pulse is unnecessary, hence reducing operation time, and ensuring the gate operates below the threshold required for fault-tolerant quantum computation.
We establish theoretical bounds on qubit detuning for some of the previously proposed controlled-NOT (CNOT) logic gate implementations with weakly coupled Josephson phase qubits. It is found that in the two-step, iSWAP-based case the value of the detuning during the entangling operations must not exceed 2g, where g is the characteristic coupling constant. In the single-step case we consider two practical, physically distinct implementations, in which one of the qubits is driven by a concurrent rf pulse of fixed frequency. We find that when the local drive is applied to the ``reference'' qubit (with which it is in resonance), the detuning should not exceed g. If the drive is applied to the ``detuned'' qubit, generation of the perfect CNOT gate is possible at any value of detuning provided that the amplitude of the pulse can be made arbitrarily large.
We introduce a scheme for realizing arbitrary controlled-unitary operations in a two-qubit system. If the $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}2$ unitary matrix is special unitary (has unit determinant), the controlled-unitary gate operation can be realized in a single pulse operation. The pulse in our scheme will constitute varying one of the parameters of the system between an arbitrarily maximum and a ``calculated'' minimum value. This parameter will constitute the variable parameter of the system while the other parameters, which include the coupling between the two qubits, will be treated as fixed parameters. The values of the parameters are what we solve for using our approach in order to realize an arbitrary controlled-unitary operation. We further show that the computational complexity of the operation is no greater than that required for a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate. Since conventional schemes realize a controlled-unitary operation by breaking it into a sequence of single-qubit and CNOT gate operations, our method is an improvement because we not only require less time duration, but also fewer control lines to implement the same operation. To demonstrate improvement over other schemes, we show, as examples, how two controlled-unitary operations, one being the controlled-Hadamard gate, can be realized in a single pulse operation using our scheme. Furthermore, our method can be applied to a wide range of coupling schemes and can be used to realize gate operations between two qubits coupled via Ising, Heisenberg, and anisotropic interactions.
The promise of tremendous computational power, coupled with the development of robust error-correcting schemes, has fuelled extensive efforts to build a quantum computer. The requirements for realizing such a device are confounding: scalable quantum bits (two-level quantum systems, or qubits) that can be well isolated from the environment, but also initialized, measured and made to undergo controllable interactions to implement a universal set of quantum logic gates. The usual set consists of single qubit rotations and a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, which flips the state of a target qubit conditional on the control qubit being in the state 1. Here we report an unambiguous experimental demonstration and comprehensive characterization of quantum CNOT operation in an optical system. We produce all four entangled Bell states as a function of only the input qubits' logical values, for a single operating condition of the gate. The gate is probabilistic (the qubits are destroyed upon failure), but with the addition of linear optical quantum non-demolition measurements, it is equivalent to the CNOT gate required for scalable all-optical quantum computation.