In creating a large-scale quantum information processor, the ability to construct control pulses for implementing an arbitrary quantum circuit in a scalable manner is an important requirement. For liquid-state nuclear-magnetic-resonance quantum computing, a circuit is generally realized through a sequence of selective soft pulses, in which various control imperfections exist and are to be corrected. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of the errors arisen in a selective pulse network by using the zeroth- and first-order average Hamiltonian theory. Effective correction rules are derived for adjusting important pulse parameters such as irradiation frequencies, rotational angles, and transmission phases of the selective pulses to increase the control fidelity. Simulations show that applying our compilation procedure for a given circuit is efficient and can greatly reduce the error accumulation.
In creating a large-scale quantum information processor, the ability to construct control pulses for implementing an arbitrary quantum circuit in a scalable manner is an important requirement. For liquid-state nuclear-magnetic-resonance quantum computing, a circuit is generally realized through a sequence of selective soft pulses, in which various control imperfections exist and are to be corrected. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of the errors arisen in a selective pulse network by using the zeroth- and first-order average Hamiltonian theory. Effective correction rules are derived for adjusting important pulse parameters such as irradiation frequencies, rotational angles, and transmission phases of the selective pulses to increase the control fidelity. Simulations show that applying our compilation procedure for a given circuit is efficient and can greatly reduce the error accumulation.
We describe a method for improving coherent control through the use of detailed knowledge of the system’s Hamiltonian. Precise unitary transformations were obtained by strongly modulating the system’s dynamics to average out unwanted evolution. With the aid of numerical search methods, pulsed irradiation schemes are obtained that perform accurate, arbitrary, selective gates on multiqubit systems. Compared to low power selective pulses, which cannot average out all unwanted evolution, these pulses are substantially shorter in time, thereby reducing the effects of relaxation. Liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance techniques on homonuclear spin systems are used to demonstrate the accuracy of these gates both in simulation and experiment. Simulations of the coherent evolution of a three-qubit system show that the control sequences faithfully implement the unitary operations, typically yielding gate fidelities on the order of 0.999 and, for some sequences, up to 0.9997. The experimentally determined density matrices resulting from the application of different control sequences on a three-spin system have overlaps of up to 0.99 with the expected states, confirming the quality of the experimental implementation.
In building a quantum-information processor (QIP), the challenge is to coherently control a large quantum system well enough to perform an arbitrary quantum algorithm and to be able to correct errors induced by decoherence. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) QIPs offer an excellent testbed on which to develop and benchmark tools and techniques to control quantum systems. Two main issues to consider when designing control methods are accuracy and efficiency, for which two complementary approaches have been developed so far to control qubit registers with liquid-state NMR methods. The first applies optimal control theory to numerically optimize the control fields to implement unitary operations on low-dimensional systems with high fidelity. The second technique is based on the efficient optimization of a sequence of imperfect control elements so that implementation of a full quantum algorithm is possible while minimizing error accumulation. This paper summarizes our work in implementing both of these methods. Furthermore, we show that taken together, they form a basis to design quantum control methods for a block-architecture QIP so that large system size is not a barrier to implementing optimal control techniques.
With the development of quantum information science, the active manipulation of quantum systems is becoming an important research frontier. To build realistic quantum information processors, one of the challenges is to implement arbitrary desired operations with high precision on quantum systems. A large number of quantum control methods and relevant numerical techniques have been put forward in recent years, such as quantum optimal control and quantum feedback control. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spin systems offer an excellent testbed to develop benchmark tools and techniques for controlling quantum systems. In this review paper, we briefly introduce some of the basic control ideas developed for NMR systems in recent years. We first explain, for the liquid spin systems, the physics of various couplings and the causes of relaxation effects. These mechanisms govern the system dynamics, and thus are crucial for constructing rigorous and efficient control models. We also identify three types of available control means: 1) raido-frequency fields as coherent controls; 2) phase cycling, gradient fields and relaxation effects as non-unitary controls; 3) radiation damping effect as feedback control mechanism. Then, we elucidate some important control tasks, which may arise from the conventional NMR spectroscopy (e.g., pulse design and polarization transfer) or from quantum information science (e.g., algorithmic cooling and pseudo-pure state preparation). In the last part, we review some of the most important control methods that are applicable to NMR control tasks. For systems with a relatively small number of spins, it is possible to use analytic optimal control theory to realize the target unitary operations. However, for larger systems, numerical methods are necessary. The gradient ascent pulse engineering algorithm and pulse compiler techniques are the most successful techniques for implementing complicated quantum networks currently. There are some interesting topics of utilizing radiation damping and relaxation effects to achieve more powerful controls. Finally, we give an outline of the possible future work.
A quantum circuit network is a set of circuits that implements a certain computation task. Being at the centre of the quantum circuit network, the multi-qubit controlled phase shift is one of the most important quantum gates. In this paper, we apply the method of modular structuring in classical computer architecture to the quantum computer and give a recursive realization of the multi-qubit phase gate. This realization of the controlled phase shift gate is convenient in realizing certain quantum algorithms. We have experimentally implemented this modularized multi-qubit controlled phase gate in a three-qubit nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) quantum system. The network is demonstrated experimentally using line selective pulses in the NMR technique. The procedure has the advantage of being simple and easy to implement.
In this study, we report the experimental realization of seven-qubit Deutsch-Jozsa (D-J) algorithm and controlled phase-shift gates with improved precision using liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The experimental results have shown that transformationsU f in the seven-qubit D-J algorithm have been implemented with different pulse sequences, and whetherf is constant or balanced is determined by using only a single function call (U f ). Furthermore, we propose an experimental method to measure and correct the error in the controlled phase-shift gate that is simple and feasible in experiments, and can have precise phase shifts. These may offer the possibility of surmounting the difficulties of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in multi-qubit NMR quantum computers, more complicated experimental techniques, and the increase of gate errors due to using a large number of imperfect selective pulses. These are also applied to more complicated quantum algorithms with more qubits, such as quantum Fourier transformation and Shor’s algorithm.
Quantum information processing has been the subject of countless discoveries since the early 1990's. It is believed to be the way of the future for computation: using quantum systems permits one to perform computation exponentially faster than on a regular classical computer. Unfortunately, quantum systems that not isolated do not behave well. They tend to lose their quantum nature due to the presence of the environment. If key information is known about the noise present in the system, methods such as quantum error correction have been developed in order to reduce the errors introduced by the environment during a given quantum computation. In order to harness the quantum world and implement the theoretical ideas of quantum information processing and quantum error correction, it is imperative to understand and quantify the noise present in the quantum processor and benchmark the quality of the control over the qubits. Usual techniques to estimate the noise or the control are based on quantum process tomography (QPT), which, unfortunately, demands an exponential amount of resources. \n \nThis thesis presents work towards the characterization of noisy processes in an efficient manner. The protocols are developed from a purely abstract setting with no system-dependent variables. To circumvent the exponential nature of quantum process tomography, three different efficient protocols are proposed and experimentally verified. The first protocol uses the idea of quantum error correction to extract relevant parameters about a given noise model, namely the correlation between the dephasing of two qubits. Following that is a protocol using randomization and symmetrization to extract the probability that a given number of qubits are simultaneously corrupted in a quantum memory, regardless of the specifics of the error and which qubits are affected. Finally, a last protocol, still using randomization ideas, is developed to estimate the average fidelity per computational gates for single and multi qubit systems. \n \nEven though liquid state NMR is argued to be unsuitable for scalable quantum information processing, it remains the best test-bed system to experimentally implement, verify and develop protocols aimed at increasing the control over general quantum information processors. For this reason, all the protocols described in this thesis have been implemented in liquid state NMR, which then led to further development of control and analysis techniques.