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arXiv:1704.07564 · Physical Review A

State protection by quantum control before and after noise processes

Hiroaki Wakamura, Ryûitirô Kawakubo, Tatsuhiko Koike

Published Aug 29, 2017• 9 citations
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Abstract

We discuss protection of a quantum state that goes through a noise process by measurements and operations before and after the noise process. In our previous work, we showed the nonexistence of ``truly quantum'' protocols that protect an unknown qubit state against depolarizing noise better than ``classical'' ones. Toward identifying the class of noise processes that is optimally suppressed by such a ``classical'' protocol, we extend our previous result in two directions. First, we show that the statement is also true in any finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, which was previously conjectured; the optimal protocol is either the do nothing protocol or the discriminate and reprepare protocol, depending on the strength of the noise. Second, in the case of a single qubit, we show that essentially the same conclusion holds for any unital noise. Thus, the noise must be nonunital for a control protocol beyond ``classical'' ones to exist.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.96.022325

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We discuss protection of a quantum state that goes through a noise process by measurements and operations before and after the noise process. In our previous work, we showed the nonexistence of truly quantum'' protocols that protect an unknown qubit state against depolarizing noise better than classical'' ones. Toward identifying the class of noise processes that is optimally suppressed by such a classical'' protocol, we extend our previous result in two directions. First, we show that the statement is also true in any finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, which was previously conjectured; the optimal protocol is either the do nothing protocol or the discriminate and reprepare protocol, depending on the strength of the noise. Second, in the case of a single qubit, we show that essentially the same conclusion holds for any unital noise. Thus, the noise must be nonunital for a control protocol beyond classical'' ones to exist.
We discuss the possibility of protecting the state of a quantum system that goes through noise by measurements and operations before and after the noise process. The aim is to seek the optimal protocol that makes the input and output states as close as possible and to clarify the role of the measurements therein. We consider two cases: one can perform quantum measurements and operations (i) only after the noise process and (ii) both before and after. We prove in a two-dimensional Hilbert space that, in case (i), the noise suppression is essentially impossible for all types of noise and, in case (ii), the optimal protocol for the depolarizing noise is either the ``do nothing'' protocol or the ``discriminate and reprepare'' protocol. These protocols are not ``truly quantum'' and can be considered as classical. They involve no measurement or only use the measurement outcomes. These results describe the fundamental limitations in quantum mechanics from the viewpoint of control theory. Finally, we conjecture that a statement similar to case (ii) holds for higher-dimensional Hilbert spaces and present some numerical evidence.
Protection of the quantum coherence and discord in realistic quantum systems interacting with the environment of depolarizing noise is an important subject in quantum information processing. Weak measurement and measurement reversal can effectively suppress the amplitude damping-class decoherence. In this paper, we examine the effect of this protocol in the protection of quantum coherence and discord subjected to depolarizing noise environments. Our scheme consists of a prior weak measurement on each qubit before interacting with noisy channels followed by post measurement reversal. It is found that quantum coherence and discord can be enhanced to an optimal value by performing weak measurements and adjusting measurement parameters on each qubit. In addition, the maximal value of the quantum coherence and discord is found to be independent of the initial-state parameters.
Quantum systems are intrinsically fragile and highly vulnerable to environmental noise, making the preservation of quantum states one of the fundamental challenges in realizing practical quantum technologies. We propose two noise-agnostic quantum state protection protocols based on a collisional model. The first protocol preserves quantum states of qubits without requiring complete prior knowledge of the underlying noise dynamics, and the second even protects a logical qubit under similar circumstances. These protocols provide robust protection for arbitrary single-qubit and entangled states against general noise processes. Furthermore, their capability to safeguard quantum states with an arbitrary number of qubits enhances the reliability, robustness, and scalability of emerging quantum architectures. These results establish the proposed framework as a promising approach for practical quantum information processing.
Due to the interaction with the environment, a quantum state is often affected by the different types of noises which becomes to one of the biggest problems for practical quantum computation. We study the possibility of protecting the mixed state of a quantum system that goes through noise by weak measurements and control operations. The aim is to find the optimal measurement strength and control operations and make the input and output states as close as possible. We show that our scheme can effectively protect arbitrary mixed states against typical types of noise sources: amplitude damping, phase damping and amplitude-phase damping. The optimal measurement and control operators are deduced in different bases of the Bloch sphere to find the best control scheme for each type of noise. The effectiveness of our control scheme is demonstrated by simulation results.
This thesis addresses the of developing a counter-part of the well established classical theory of control. We dwell on the fundamental fact that states are generally not perfectly distinguishable, and measurements typically introduce noise in the system being measured. Because of these, it is generally not clear whether the central concept of the classical control theory --- that of observing the system and then applying feedback --- is always useful in the setting. We center our investigations around the of transforming the state of a system into a given target state, when the system can be prepared in different ways, and the target state depends on the choice of preparation. We call this the quantum tracking problem and show how it can be formulated as an optimization that can be approached both numerically and analytically. This provides a simple route to the characterization of the trade-off between information gain and disturbance, and is seen to have several applications in information. In order to characterize the optimality of our tracking procedures, some figure-of-merit has to be specified. Naturally, distance measures for states are the ideal candidates for this purpose. We investigated several possibilities, and found that there is usually a compromise between physically motivated and mathematically tractable measures. We also introduce an alternative to the Uhlmann-Jozsa fidelity for mixed states, which besides reproducing a number of properties of the standard fidelity, is especially attractive because it is simpler to compute. We employ some ideas of convex analysis to construct optimal control schemes analytically. In particular, we obtain analytic forms of optimal controllers for stabilizing and tracking any pair of states of a single-qubit. In the case of stabilization, we find that feedback control is always useful, but because of the trade-off between information gain and disturbance, somewhat different from the type of feedback performed in classical systems. In the case of tracking, we find that feedback is not always useful, meaning that depending on the choice of states one wants to achieve, it may be better not to introduce any noise by the application of measurements. We also demonstrate that our optimal controllers are immediately applicable in several information applications such as state-dependent cloning, purification, stabilization, and discrimination. In all of these cases, we were able to recover and extend previously known optimal strategies and performances. Finally we show how optimal single-step control schemes can be concatenated to provide multi-step strategies that usually over-perform optimal control protocols based on a single interaction between the controller and the system.
Quantum state purification protocols, which mitigate noise by converting multiple copies of noisy quantum states into fewer copies with a lower noise level, have applications in quantum communication and computation with imperfect devices. Here, we systematically study the task of state purification in distributed quantum systems, demanding that purification be achieved by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We prove that, in the presence of depolarizing noise, no LOCC purification protocol starting from two copies can work blindly for all the states in three important sets: the set of all pure two-qubit states, the set of all two-qubit maximally entangled states, and the Bell basis. In stark contrast, we show that a targeted, single-state purification is always achievable in the presence of depolarizing noise, and we provide an explicit analytical LOCC protocol for every given two-qubit state. For arbitrary finite sets of pure states and arbitrary noise profiles, we develop an optimization-based algorithm that systematically designs LOCC purification protocols, and we demonstrate it through concrete examples. Overall, our results identify both fundamental limitations and practical noise-reduction strategies for distributed quantum information processing.