We present a remarkable finding that a recently discovered [G. S. Uhrig, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 100504 (2007)10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.100504] series of pulse sequences, designed to optimally restore coherence to a qubit in the spin-boson model of decoherence, is in fact completely model independent and generically valid for arbitrary dephasing Hamiltonians given sufficiently short delay times between pulses. The series maximizes qubit fidelity versus number of applied pulses for sufficiently short delay times because the series, with each additional pulse, cancels successive orders of a time expansion for the fidelity decay. The "magical" universality of this property, which was not appreciated earlier, requires that a linearly growing set of "unknowns" (the delay times) must simultaneously satisfy an exponentially growing set of nonlinear equations that involve arbitrary dephasing Hamiltonian operators.
Dynamical decoupling (DD) eliminates qubit-bath coupling by applying a sequence of instantaneous pulses. While qubit-bath couplings generally lead to qubit relaxation and dephasing, qubit-qubit couplings are often used to manipulate or control quantum states. We investigate the available control operations in two DD schemes, named periodic DD (PDD) and Uhrig DD (UDD), to see whether universal quantum computation can be realized in these decoupled systems. We find that universal control is possible using Heisenberg interaction in both periodically decoupled system and Uhrig decoupled system, and the available control operations under two kinds of DD sequences obey the same commutation relation. In the UDD case, we also derive a rough bound for control errors.
We prove the universality of the generalized QDD
N1N2 (quadratic dynamical decoupling) pulse sequence for near-optimal suppression of general single-qubit decoherence. Earlier work showed numerically that this dynamical decoupling sequence, which consists of an inner Uhrig DD (UDD) and outer UDD sequence using
N1 and
N2 pulses, respectively, can eliminate decoherence to
O(TN) using
O(N2) unequally spaced ``ideal'' (zero-width) pulses, where
T is the total evolution time and
N=N1=N2. A proof of the universality of QDD has been given for even
N1. Here we give a general universality proof of QDD for arbitrary
N1 and
N2. As in earlier proofs, our result holds for arbitrary bounded environments. Furthermore, we explore the single-axis (polarization) error suppression abilities of the inner and outer UDD sequences. We analyze both the single-axis QDD performance and how the overall performance of QDD depends on the single-axis errors. We identify various performance effects related to the parities and relative magnitudes of
N1 and
N2. We prove that using QDD
N1N2 decoherence can always be eliminated to
O(TminN1,N2).
Uhrig's dynamical decoupling pulse sequence has emerged as a universal and highly promising approach to decoherence suppression. So far, both the theoretical and experimental studies have examined single-qubit decoherence only. This work extends Uhrig's universal dynamical decoupling from one-qubit to two-qubit systems and even to general multilevel quantum systems. In particular, we show that by designing appropriate control Hamiltonians for a two-qubit or a multilevel system, Uhrig's pulse sequence can also preserve a generalized quantum coherence measure to the order of
1+O(TN+1) with only
N pulses. Our results lead to a very useful scheme for efficiently locking two-qubit entangled states. Future important applications of Uhrig's pulse sequence in preserving the quantum coherence of multilevel quantum systems can also be anticipated.
We study the suppression of qubit dephasing through Uhrig dynamical decoupling (UDD) in nontrivial environments modeled within the spin-boson formalism. In particular, we address the case of (i) a qubit coupled to a bosonic bath with power-law spectral density, and (ii) a qubit coupled to a single harmonic oscillator that dissipates energy into a bosonic bath, which embodies an example of a structured bath for the qubit. We then model the influence of random time jitter in the UDD protocol by sorting pulse-application times from Gaussian distributions centered at appropriate values dictated by the optimal protocol. In case (i) we find that, when few pulses are applied and a sharp cutoff is considered, longer coherence times and robust UDD performances (against random timing errors) are achieved for a super-Ohmic bath. On the other hand, when an exponential cutoff is considered, a super-Ohmic bath is undesirable. In case (ii) the best scenario is obtained for an overdamped harmonic motion. Our study provides relevant information for the implementation of optimized schemes for the protection of quantum states from decoherence.
We analyze the suppression of decoherence by means of dynamical decoupling in the pure-dephasing spin-boson model for baths with power law spectra. The sequence of ideal $\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulses is optimized according to the power of the bath. We expand the decoherence function and separate the canceling divergences from the relevant terms. The proposed sequence is chosen to be the one minimizing the decoherence function. By construction, it provides the best performance. We analytically derive the conditions that must be satisfied. The resulting equations are solved numerically. The solutions are very close to the Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill sequence for a soft cutoff of the bath while they approach the Uhrig dynamical-decoupling sequence as the cutoff becomes harder.