Geometric phase, associated with holonomy transformation in quantum state space, is an important quantum-mechanical effect. Besides fundamental interest, this effect has practical applications, among which geometric quantum computation is a paradigm, where quantum logic operations are realized through geometric phase manipulation that has some intrinsic noise-resilient advantages and may enable simplified implementation of multi-qubit gates compared to the dynamical approach. Here we report observation of a continuous-variable geometric phase and demonstrate a quantum gate protocol based on this phase in a superconducting circuit, where five qubits are controllably coupled to a resonator. Our geometric approach allows for one-step implementation of n-qubit controlled-phase gates, which represents a remarkable advantage compared to gate decomposition methods, where the number of required steps dramatically increases with n. Following this approach, we realize these gates with n up to 4, verifying the high efficiency of this geometric manipulation for quantum computation.
Geometric phase, associated with holonomy transformation in quantum state space, is an important quantum-mechanical effect. Besides fundamental interest, this effect has practical applications, among which geometric quantum computation is a paradigm, where quantum logic operations are realized through geometric phase manipulation that has some intrinsic noise-resilient advantages and may enable simplified implementation of multi-qubit gates compared to the dynamical approach. Here we report observation of a continuous-variable geometric phase and demonstrate a quantum gate protocol based on this phase in a superconducting circuit, where five qubits are controllably coupled to a resonator. Our geometric approach allows for one-step implementation of n-qubit controlled-phase gates, which represents a remarkable advantage compared to gate decomposition methods, where the number of required steps dramatically increases with n. Following this approach, we realize these gates with n up to 4, verifying the high efficiency of this geometric manipulation for quantum computation.
Holonomies, arising from non-Abelian geometric transformations of quantum states in Hilbert space, offer a promising way for quantum computation. These holonomies are not commutable and thus can be used for the realization of a universal set of quantum logic gates, where the global geometric feature may result in some noise-resilient advantages. Here we report, to our knowledge, the first on-chip realization of a non-Abelian geometric controlled-NOT gate in a superconducting circuit, which is a building block for constructing a holonomic quantum computer. The conditional dynamics is achieved in an all-to-all connected architecture involving multiple frequency-tunable superconducting qubits controllably coupled to a resonator; a holonomic gate between any two qubits can be implemented by tuning their frequencies on-resonance with the resonator and applying a two-tone drive to one of them. This gate represents an important step towards the all-geometric realization of scalable quantum computation on a superconducting platform.
Quantum gates, which are the essential building blocks of quantum computers, are very fragile. Thus, to realize robust quantum gates with high fidelity is the ultimate goal of quantum manipulation. Here, we propose a nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation scheme on superconducting circuits to engineer arbitrary quantum gates, which share both the robust merit of geometric phases and the capacity to combine with optimal control technique to further enhance the gate robustness. Specifically, in our proposal, arbitrary geometric single-qubit gates can be realized on a transmon qubit, by a resonant microwave field driving, with both the amplitude and phase of the driving being time-dependent. Meanwhile, nontrivial two-qubit geometric gates can be implemented by two capacitively coupled transmon qubits, with one of the transmon qubits’ frequency being modulated to obtain effective resonant coupling between them. Therefore, our scheme provides a promising step towards fault-tolerant solid-state quantum computation.
Using geometric phases to realize noise-resilient quantum computing is an important method to enhance the control fidelity. In this work, we experimentally realize a universal nonadiabatic geometric quantum gate set in a superconducting qubit chain. We characterize the realized single- and two-qubit geometric gates with both quantum process tomography and randomized benchmarking methods. The measured average fidelities for the single-qubit rotation gates and two-qubit controlled-Z gate are 0.9977(1) and 0.977(9), respectively. Besides, we also experimentally demonstrate the noise-resilient feature of the realized single-qubit geometric gates by comparing their performance with the conventional dynamical gates with different types of errors in the control field. Thus, our experiment proves a way to achieve high-fidelity geometric quantum gates for robust quantum computation.
Recently, nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation has received much attention due to its fast manipulation and intrinsic error-resilience characteristics. However, to obtain universal geometric quantum control, only limited and special evolution paths have been proposed, which usually require longer gate-time and more operational steps, and thus lead to lower quality of the implemented quantum gates. Here, we present an effective scheme to find the shortest geometric path under conventional conditions of geometric quantum computation, where high-fidelity and robust geometric gates can be realized by only single-loop evolution, and the gate performances are better than the corresponding dynamical ones. Furthermore, we can optimize the pulse shapes in our scheme to further shorten the gate-time, which is determined by how fast the path is traveled. In addition, we also present its physical implementation on superconducting circuits, consisting of capacitively coupled transmon qubits, where fidelities of geometric single- and two-qubit gates can be higher than 99.95% and 99.80% within the current state-of-the-art experimental technologies, respectively. These results indicate that our scheme is promising for large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computation.
Geometric quantum computation offers a practical strategy toward robust quantum computation due to its inherent error tolerance. However, the rigorous geometric conditions lead to complex and/or error-disturbed quantum controls, especially for logical qubits that involve more physical qubits, whose error tolerance is effective in principle, but their experimental demonstration is still demanding. Thus, how to best simplify the needed control and manifest its full advantage has become the key to widespread applications of geometric quantum computation. Here we propose a fast and robust geometric scheme, with decoherence-free subspace encoding, and present its physical implementation on superconducting quantum circuits, where we only utilize the experimentally demonstrated parametrically tunable coupling to achieve high-fidelity geometric control over logical qubits. Numerical simulation verifies that it can efficiently combine the error tolerance from both the geometric phase and logical-qubit encoding, displaying our gate-performance superiority over the conventional dynamical one without encoding, in terms of both gate fidelity and robustness. Therefore, our scheme can consolidate both error suppression methods for logical-qubit control, which sheds light on the future large-scale quantum computation.
Quantum gates based on geometric phases possess intrinsic noise-resilience features and therefore attract much attention. However, the implementations of previous geometric quantum computation typically require a long pulse time of gates. As a result, their experimental control inevitably suffers from the cumulative disturbances of systematic errors due to excessive time consumption. Here, we experimentally implement a set of noncyclic and nonadiabatic geometric quantum gates in a superconducting circuit, which greatly shortens the gate time. And also, we experimentally verify that our universal single-qubit geometric gates are more robust to both the Rabi frequency error and qubit frequency shift-induced error, compared to the conventional dynamical gates, by using the randomized benchmarking method. Moreover, this scheme can be utilized to construct two-qubit geometric operations, while the generation of the maximally entangled Bell states is demonstrated. Therefore, our results provide a promising routine to achieve fast, high-fidelity, and error-resilient quantum gates in superconducting quantum circuits.