Introduction In this chapter we continue the introduction to dynamical decoupling techniques for open quantum systems that was started in Chapter 4. Here we focus on the construction of efficient schemes for dynamical decoupling and we highlight some combinatorial constructions. Efficiency of decoupling schemes is measured in terms of the number of control operations to be applied to the system. This number should be small, ideally a polynomial in the number of qubits in the system. If we assume that the quantum system is governed by a general Hamiltonian H S , having interactions involving any subset of the qubits, then any scheme that achieves decoupling of H S is necessarily inefficient in the above sense. The efficient schemes we consider here arise in physically realistic situations where there are much more stringent restrictions on the types of interactions. The most important example is the case of pair-interaction Hamiltonians. These Hamiltonians can be expressed as sums of interaction terms that involve at most two qubits. While there is a large body of work on dynamical decoupling schemes for pair-interaction Hamiltonians [S90, EBW94,WHH68, H76], which historically has been used mainly in the context of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) theory, the past few years have seen a development of new techniques for decoupling that are based on group theory. We therefore call such techniques, or rather the pulse sequences that an experimenter can apply to a given Hamiltonian in order to selectively switch off unwanted couplings, combinatorial decoupling schemes.
In the field of quantum information, a major challenge is to protect and shield quantum systems from environmental influences, which cause dissipation and decoherence. One approach to address this problem is called dynamical decoupling, where we act on a quantum system with a series of fast and strong local control operations. If done correctly, the system's state gets rotated in discrete steps in its state space in such a way that the effects of the environment cancel up to a certain order. In the first part of this thesis, we will introduce the basics of dynamical decoupling and present a new approach for constructing dynamical decoupling schemes based on sequences of Weyl operators on networks of qudits. This approach goes beyond merely protecting a quantum system, as it is also capable of altering existing Hamiltonian interactions in ways suitable for quantum simulation purposes. We will also investigate how imperfect controls influence the effectiveness of dynamical decoupling and focus particularly on stochastic noise. In the second part of the thesis, we study concrete scenarios for the application of dynamical decoupling. First, we consider the task of quantum state transfer on a linear chain of qubits and use decoupling to protect the transfer from detrimental influences caused by a bend in the chain. We also look at how to design the specific interaction strengths required on the chain to make the state transfer work and extend this result to chains of qudits. Another chapter deals with decoupling the atomic centre-of-mass motion of a trapped atom or ion in a cavity interacting with a radiation field. Finally, we use decoupling to execute sequences of one- and two-qubit quantum gates on a chain of coupled qubits. Particular care is taken to ensure high fidelity operations in the presence of imperfect decoupling pulses.
An embedded selective recoupling method is proposed which is based on the idea of embedding the recently proposed deterministic selective recoupling scheme of Yamaguchi et al. into a stochastic dynamical decoupling method, such as the recently proposed Pauli-random-error-correction scheme. The recoupling scheme enables the implementation of elementary quantum gates in a quantum information processor by partial suppression of the unwanted interactions. The random dynamical decoupling method cancels a significant part of the residual interactions. Thus the time scale of reliable quantum computation is increased significantly. Numerical simulations are presented for a conditional two-qubit swap gate and for a complex iterative quantum algorithm.
Decoupling schemes are used in quantum information processing to selectively switch off unwanted interactions in a multipartite Hamiltonian. A decoupling scheme consists of a sequence of local unitary operations which are applied to the system's qudits and alternate with the natural time evolution of the Hamiltonian. Several constructions of decoupling schemes have been given in the literature. Here we focus on two such schemes. The first is based on certain triples of submatrices of Hadamard matrices that are closed under pointwise multiplication (see Leung, “Simulation and reversal of
n-qubit Hamiltonians using Hadamard matrices,” J. Mod. Opt., vol. 49, pp. 1199–1217, 2002), the second uses orthogonal arrays (see Stollsteimer and Mahler, “Suppression of arbitrary internal couplings in a quantum register,” Phys. Rev. A., vol. 64, p. 052301, 2001). We show that both methods lead to the same class of decoupling schemes. We extend the first method to
2-local qudit Hamiltonians, where
dgeq2. Furthermore, we extend the second method to
t-local qudit Hamiltonians, where
tgeq2and
dgeq2, by using orthogonal arrays of strength
t. We also establish a characterization of orthogonal arrays of strength
tby showing that they are equivalent to decoupling schemes for
t-local Hamiltonians which have the property that they can be refined to have time-slots of equal length. The methods used to derive efficient decoupling schemes are based on classical error-correcting codes.
Dynamical decoupling is a long-established and effective way to suppress unwanted interactions in qubit systems, enabling advances in fields ranging from quantum metrology to quantum computing. For general qudit systems, however, comparable protocols remain rare, mainly because Hamiltonian engineering in higher dimensions lacks the geometric intuition available for qubits. Here we present a general framework for dynamical decoupling in qudit systems, based on Lie group representation theory. By extending the group theory approach to dynamical decoupling, we show how decoupling groups can be systematically identified among the finite subgroups of SU(d) by analyzing their access to the irreducible components of the operator space. As an application, we construct new pulse sequences for interacting qutrit systems based on finite subgroups of SU(3), and show how subgroup factorizations and group orientations can be exploited to obtain shorter and more experimentally practical protocols for spin-1 systems with large zero-field splitting. We further show that the same symmetry-based framework yields quantum error-correcting codes: whenever a finite subgroup of SU(d) acts as a decoupling group for the relevant set of operators, the associated one-dimensional symmetry sectors define codespaces satisfying the Knill-Laflamme conditions, thereby unifying dynamical decoupling and quantum error correction in multi-level quantum systems.
State transfer across discrete quantum networks is one of the elementary tasks of quantum information processing. Its aim is the faithful placement of information into a specific position in the network. However, all physical systems suffer from imperfections, which can severely limit the transfer fidelity. We present selective dynamical decoupling schemes which are capable of stabilizing imperfect quantum state transfer protocols on the model of a bent linear qubit chain. The efficiency of the schemes is tested and verified in numerical simulations on a number of realistic cases. The simulations demonstrate that these selective dynamical decoupling schemes are capable of suppressing unwanted errors in quantum state transfer protocols efficiently.