Quantum computation provides great speedup over its classical counterpart for certain problems. One of the key challenges for quantum computation is to realize precise control of the quantum system in the presence of noise. Control of the spin-qubits in solids with the accuracy required by fault-tolerant quantum computation under ambient conditions remains elusive. Here, we quantitatively characterize the source of noise during quantum gate operation and demonstrate strategies to suppress the effect of these. A universal set of logic gates in a nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond are reported with an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 0.999952 and two-qubit gate fidelity of 0.992. These high control fidelities have been achieved at room temperature in naturally abundant (13)C diamond via composite pulses and an optimized control method.
Quantum computation provides great speedup over its classical counterpart for certain problems. One of the key challenges for quantum computation is to realize precise control of the quantum system in the presence of noise. Control of the spin-qubits in solids with the accuracy required by fault-tolerant quantum computation under ambient conditions remains elusive. Here, we quantitatively characterize the source of noise during quantum gate operation and demonstrate strategies to suppress the effect of these. A universal set of logic gates in a nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond are reported with an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 0.999952 and two-qubit gate fidelity of 0.992. These high control fidelities have been achieved at room temperature in naturally abundant (13)C diamond via composite pulses and an optimized control method.
A negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has been recognized as a good solid-state qubit. A system consisting of the electronic spin of the NV center and hyperfine-coupled nitrogen and additionally nearby carbon nuclear spins can form a quantum register of several qubits for quantum information processing or as a node in a quantum repeater. Several impressive experiments on the hybrid electron and nuclear spin register have been reported, but fidelities achieved so far are not yet at or below the thresholds required for fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC). Using quantum optimal control theory based on the Krotov method, we show here that fast and high-fidelity single-qubit and two-qubit gates in the universal quantum gate set for FTQC, taking into account the effects of the leakage state, nearby noise qubits, and distant bath spins, can be achieved with errors less than those required by the threshold theorem of FTQC.
Robust and high-fidelity control of electron spins in solids is the cornerstone for facilitating applications of solid-state spins in quantum information processing and quantum sensing. However, precise control of spin systems is always challenging due to the presence of various noises originating from the thermal environment and control fields. Here, noise-resilient quantum gates, designed with robust optimal control (ROC) algorithms, are demonstrated experimentally with nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to realize tailored robustness against detunings and Rabi errors simultaneously. In the presence of both 10% off-resonance detuning and 10% deviation of a Rabi frequency, we achieve an average single-qubit gate fidelity of up to 99.89%. Our experiments also show that, ROC-based multipulse quantum sensing sequences can suppress spurious responses resulting from finite widths and imperfections of microwave pulses, which provides an efficient strategy for enhancing the performance of existing multipulse quantum sensing sequences.
At its most fundamental level, circuit-based quantum computation relies on the application of controlled phase shift operations on quantum registers. While these operations are generally compromised by noise and imperfections, quantum gates based on geometric phase shifts can provide intrinsically fault-tolerant quantum computing. Here we demonstrate the high-fidelity realization of a recently proposed fast (non-adiabatic) and universal (non-Abelian) holonomic single-qubit gate, using an individual solid-state spin qubit under ambient conditions. This fault-tolerant quantum gate provides an elegant means for achieving the fidelity threshold indispensable for implementing quantum error correction protocols. Since we employ a spin qubit associated with a nitrogen-vacancy colour centre in diamond, this system is based on integrable and scalable hardware exhibiting strong analogy to current silicon technology. This quantum gate realization is a promising step towards viable, fault-tolerant quantum computing under ambient conditions. Quantum gates based on geometric phase shifts offer a promising approach for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Using nitrogen-vacancy centre qubits in diamond, this study experimentally realises a high-fidelty, non-adiabatic, non-Abelian holonomic single-qubit gate at room temperature.
Geometric phases and holonomies are a promising resource for the realization of high-fidelity quantum operations in noisy devices, due to their intrinsic fault-tolerance against parametric noise. However, for a long time their practical use in quantum computing was limited to proof of principle demonstrations. This was partly due to the need for adiabatic time evolution or the requirement of complex, high-dimensional state spaces and a large number of driving field parameters to achieve universal quantum gates employing holonomies. In 2016 Liang et al. proposed universal, superadiabatic, geometric quantum gates exploiting transitionless quantum driving, thereby offering fast and universal quantum gate performance on a simple two-level system. Here, we report on the experimental implementation of a set of non-commuting single-qubit superadiabatic, geometric quantum gates on the electron spin of the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond under ambient conditions. This provides a promising and powerful tool for large-scale quantum computing under realistic, noisy experimental conditions.
High-fidelity quantum gates are a cornerstone of any quantum computing and communications architecture. Realizing such control in the presence of realistic errors at the level required for beyond-threshold quantum error correction is a long-standing challenge for all quantum hardware platforms. Here we theoretically develop and experimentally demonstrate error-protected quantum gates in a solid-state quantum network node. Our work combines room-temperature randomized benchmarking with a new class of composite pulses that are simultaneously robust to frequency and amplitude, affecting random and systematic errors. We introduce Power-Unaffected, Doubly-Detuning-Insensitive Gates (PUDDINGs) -- a theoretical framework for constructing conditional gates with immunity to both amplitude and frequency errors. For single-qubit and two-qubit CNOT gate demonstrations in a solid-state nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond, we systematically measure an improvement in the error per gate up to a factor of 9. By projecting the application of PUDDING to cryogenic temperatures we show a record two-qubit error per gate of 1.2×10−5, corresponding to a fidelity of 99.9988%, far below the thresholds required by surface and color code error correction. These results present viable building blocks for a new class of fault-tolerant quantum networks and represent the first experimental realization of error-protected conditional gates in solid-state systems.
A key ingredient for fault-tolerant quantum computers are sufficiently accurate logic gates on single and multiple qubits in the presence of decohering noise. In this thesis, we theoretically develop and experimentally demonstrate such high-fidelity quantum gates for semiconductor-based quantum computing. Specifically, we consider a qubit encoded in the singlet and one triplet state of two electron spins in GaAs. While its potential for optical coupling makes GaAs an attractive material, highly auto-correlated magnetic field noise from fluctuating nuclear spins leads to considerably lower coherence times than for Si-based devices, where nuclear spins can be removed by isotopic purification. In addition to noise, the control methods used in earlier experiments are based on unrealistic approximations. For these reasons, fidelities well above 99 %, as required by current quantum error correction (QEC) schemes, have not been obtained before this thesis. To tackle these issues, we extend the filter function formalism to describe quantum gates and processes in the presence of experimentally relevant non-Markovian noise. Since this formalism can consider all relevant noise sources in a computationally efficient manner, it can be used to find optimal control pulses by numerical optimization, leading to predicted single-qubit gate fidelities of 99.9 %. Furthermore, we deal with the considerable control challenges associated with this qubit type by experimental calibration of the optimized control pulses. To this end, we extend our previous experimental gate set calibration (GSC) routine to remove systematic gate errors on an arbitrary number of qubits. We apply the numerically optimized single-qubit control pulses to our GaAs sample and experimentally calibrate them with GSC. This procedure yields an average gate fidelity of 99.50 ± 0.04 % and a low leakage rate of 0.13 ± 0.03 % out of the computational subspace, characterized by randomized benchmarking. We also optimize realistic two-qubit control pulses, considering current control hardware as well as interqubit Coulomb and exchange coupling that cannot be fully turned off. Using measured noise spectra, we show that two-qubit gate fidelities of 99.90 % can be reached in GaAs, while 99.99 % can be achieved in Si. These results demonstrate that high-fidelity gates can be realized even in the presence of nuclear spins as in GaAs.