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arXiv:1108.4759 · Physical Review A

Symmetry-enhanced performance of dynamical decoupling

Stefano Pasini, Götz Silvester Uhrig

Published Oct 25, 2011• 2 citations
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Abstract

We consider a system with general decoherence and a quadratic dynamical decoupling sequence (QDD) for the coherence control of a qubit coupled to a bath of spins. We investigate the influence of the geometry and of the initial conditions of the bath on the performance of the sequence. The overall performance is quantified by a distance norm $d$. It is expected that $d$ scales with $\ensuremath{\tau}$, the total duration of the sequence, as ${\ensuremath{\tau}}^{\mathrm{min}{{N}_{x},{N}_{z}}+1}$, where ${N}_{x}$ and ${N}_{z}$ are the number of pulses of the outer and of the inner sequence, respectively. We show both numerically and analytically that the state of the bath can boost the performance of QDD under certain conditions: The scaling of QDD for a given number of pulses can be enhanced by a factor of 2 if the bath is prepared in a highly symmetric state and if the system Hamiltonian is SU(2) invariant.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.042336

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We consider a system with general decoherence and a quadratic dynamical decoupling sequence (QDD) for the coherence control of a qubit coupled to a bath of spins. We investigate the influence of the geometry and of the initial conditions of the bath on the performance of the sequence. The overall performance is quantified by a distance norm ddd. It is expected that ddd scales with \ensuremathτ\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremathτ, the total duration of the sequence, as \ensuremathτminNx,Nz+1{\ensuremath{\tau}}^{\mathrm{min}{{N}_{x},{N}_{z}}+1}\ensuremathτminNx​,Nz​+1, where Nx{N}_{x}Nx​ and Nz{N}_{z}Nz​ are the number of pulses of the outer and of the inner sequence, respectively. We show both numerically and analytically that the state of the bath can boost the performance of QDD under certain conditions: The scaling of QDD for a given number of pulses can be enhanced by a factor of 2 if the bath is prepared in a highly symmetric state and if the system Hamiltonian is SU(2) invariant.
We present rigorous performance bounds for the quadratic dynamical decoupling pulse sequence which protects a qubit from general decoherence, and for its nested generalization to an arbitrary number of qubits. Our bounds apply under the assumptions of instantaneous pulses and of bounded perturbing environment and qubit-environment Hamiltonians such as those realized by baths of nuclear spins in quantum dots. We prove that if the total sequence time is fixed then the trace-norm distance between the unperturbed and protected system states can be made arbitrarily small by increasing the number of applied pulses.
We analyze numerically the performance of the near-optimal quadratic dynamical decoupling (QDD) single-qubit decoherence errors suppression method [J. West et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 130501 (2010)]. The QDD sequence is formed by nesting two optimal Uhrig dynamical decoupling sequences for two orthogonal axes, comprising N1{N}_{1}N1​ and N2{N}_{2}N2​ pulses, respectively. Varying these numbers, we study the decoherence suppression properties of QDD directly by isolating the errors associated with each system basis operator present in the system-bath interaction Hamiltonian. Each individual error scales with the lowest order of the Dyson series, therefore immediately yielding the order of decoherence suppression. We show that the error suppression properties of QDD are dependent upon the parities of N1{N}_{1}N1​ and N2{N}_{2}N2​, and near-optimal performance is achieved for general single-qubit interactions when N1=N2{N}_{1}={N}_{2}N1​=N2​.
We prove the universality of the generalized QDDN1N2{}_{{N}_{1}{N}_{2}}N1​N2​​ (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{N}_{1}N1​ and N2{N}_{2}N2​ pulses, respectively, can eliminate decoherence to O(TN)O({T}^{N})O(TN) using O(N2)O({N}^{2})O(N2) unequally spaced ``ideal'' (zero-width) pulses, where TTT is the total evolution time and N=N1=N2N={N}_{1}={N}_{2}N=N1​=N2​. A proof of the universality of QDD has been given for even N1{N}_{1}N1​. Here we give a general universality proof of QDD for arbitrary N1{N}_{1}N1​ and N2{N}_{2}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{N}_{1}N1​ and N2{N}_{2}N2​. We prove that using QDDN1N2{}_{{N}_{1}{N}_{2}}N1​N2​​ decoherence can always be eliminated to O(TminN1,N2)O({T}^{\mathrm{min}{{N}_{1},{N}_{2}}})O(TminN1​,N2​).
We present rigorous performance bounds for the optimal dynamical decoupling pulse sequence protecting a quantum bit (qubit) against pure dephasing. Our bounds apply under the assumption of instantaneous pulses and of bounded perturbing environment and qubit-environment Hamiltonians such as those realized by baths of nuclear spins in quantum dots. We show that if the total sequence time is fixed the optimal sequence can be used to make the distance between the protected and unperturbed qubit states arbitrarily small in the number of applied pulses. If, on the other hand, the minimum pulse interval is fixed and the total sequence time is allowed to scale with the number of pulses, then longer sequences need not always be advantageous. The rigorous bound may serve as a testbed for approximate treatments of optimal decoupling in bounded models of decoherence.
We introduce a high-order dynamical decoupling (DD) scheme for arbitrary bounded system-bath interactions in the weak-coupling regime. Given any decoupling group G\mathcal GG that averages the interaction to zero, our construction {guarantees the existence of pulse sequences with at most (∣G∣−1)K(|\mathcal G|-1)K(∣G∣−1)K pulses}, while canceling all error terms linear in the system-bath coupling strength up to order KKK in the total evolution time. As a corollary, for an nnn-qubit system with kkk-local system-bath interactions, we obtain an O(nk−1K)\mathcal{O}(n^{k-1}K)O(nk−1K)-pulse sequence, a significant improvement over existing schemes with O(exp⁡(n))\mathcal{O}(\exp(n))O(exp(n)) pulses (for k=O(1)k=\mathcal{O}(1)k=O(1)). The construction is obtained via a mapping to the continuous necklace-splitting problem, which asks how to cut a multi-colored interval into pieces that give each party the same share of every color. We provide explicit pulse sequences for suppressing general single-qubit decoherence, prove that the pulse count is asymptotically optimal, and verify the predicted error scaling in numerical simulations. For the same number of pulses, we observe that our sequences outperform the state-of-the-art Quadratic DD in the weak-coupling regime. We also construct explicit high-order sequences for suppressing representative 2-local noise models. Finally, the same construction extends to suppress slow, time-dependent classical noise and to filter-function design.
Avoiding the loss of coherence of quantum mechanical states is an important prerequisite for quantum information processing. Dynamical decoupling (DD) is one of the most effective experimental methods for maintaining coherence, especially when one can access only the qubit system and not its environment (bath). It involves the application of pulses to the system whose net effect is a reversal of the system-environment interaction. In any real system, however, the environment is not static, and therefore the reversal of the system-environment interaction becomes imperfect if the spacing between refocusing pulses becomes comparable to or longer than the correlation time of the environment. The efficiency of the refocusing improves therefore if the spacing between the pulses is reduced. Here, we quantify the efficiency of different DD sequences in preserving different quantum states. We use 13C^{13}\mathrm{C}13C nuclear spins as qubits and an environment of 1H^{1}\mathrm{H}1H nuclear spins as the environment, which couples to the qubit via magnetic dipole-dipole couplings. Strong dipole-dipole couplings between the proton spins result in a rapidly fluctuating environment with a correlation time of the order of 100 $\ensuremath{\mu}$s. Our experimental results show that short delays between the pulses yield better performance if they are compared with the bath correlation time. However, as the pulse spacing becomes shorter than the bath correlation time, an optimum is reached. For even shorter delays, the pulse imperfections dominate over the decoherence losses and cause the quantum state to decay.