Based on the geometrical nature of quantum phases, non-adiabatic holonomic quantum control (NHQC) has become a standard technique for enhancing robustness in constructing quantum gates. However, the conventional approach of NHQC is sensitive to control instability, as it requires the driving pulses to cover a fixed pulse area. Furthermore, even for small-angle rotations, all operations need to be completed with the same duration of time. Here we experimentally demonstrate a time-optimal and unconventional approach of NHQC (called TOUNHQC), which can optimize the operation time of any holonomic gate. Compared with the conventional approach, TOUNHQC provides an extra layer of robustness to decoherence and control errors. The experiment involves a scalable architecture of superconducting circuit, where we achieved a fidelity of 99.51% for a single qubit gate using interleaved randomized benchmarking. Moreover, a two-qubit holonomic control-phase gate has been implemented where the gate error can be reduced by as much as 18% compared with NHQC.
Based on the geometrical nature of quantum phases, non-adiabatic holonomic quantum control (NHQC) has become a standard technique for enhancing robustness in constructing quantum gates. However, the conventional approach of NHQC is sensitive to control instability, as it requires the driving pulses to cover a fixed pulse area. Furthermore, even for small-angle rotations, all operations need to be completed with the same duration of time. Here we experimentally demonstrate a time-optimal and unconventional approach of NHQC (called TOUNHQC), which can optimize the operation time of any holonomic gate. Compared with the conventional approach, TOUNHQC provides an extra layer of robustness to decoherence and control errors. The experiment involves a scalable architecture of superconducting circuit, where we achieved a fidelity of 99.51% for a single qubit gate using interleaved randomized benchmarking. Moreover, a two-qubit holonomic control-phase gate has been implemented where the gate error can be reduced by as much as 18% compared with NHQC.
In quantum control, geometrical operations could provide an extra layer of robustness against control errors. However, the conventional non-adiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) is limited by the fact that all of the operations require exactly the same amount of evolution time, even for a small-angle rotation. Furthermore, NHQC confines the driving part of the Hamiltonian to strictly cover a fixed pulse area, making it sensitive to control errors. Here we present an unconventional approach of NHQC, termed brachistochronic NHQC, for bypassing these limitations. Specifically, with B-NHQC, non-Abelian geometric gates can be time-optimized by following the brachistochrone curve, minimizing the impact from the environmental decoherence. Additionally, we demonstrate that B-NHQC is compatible with composed pulses, which can further enhance the robustness against pulse errors. For benchmarking, we provide a thorough analysis on the performance of B-NHQC under experimental conditions; we found that the gate error can be reduced by as much as 64% compared with NHQC.
When a quantum system is driven slowly through a parametric cycle in a degenerate Hilbert space, the state would acquire a non-Abelian geometric phase, which is stable and forms the foundation for holonomic quantum computation (HQC). However, in the adiabatic limit, the environmental decoherence becomes a significant source of errors. Recently, various nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) schemes have been proposed, but all at the price of increased sensitivity to control errors. Alternatively, there exist theoretical proposals for speeding up HQC by the technique of "shortcut to adiabaticity" (STA), but no experimental demonstration has been reported so far, as these proposals involve a complicated control of four energy levels simultaneously. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate that HQC via shortcut to adiabaticity can be constructed with only three energy levels, using a superconducting qubit in a scalable architecture. With this scheme, all holonomic single-qubit operations can be realized nonadiabatically through a single cycle of state evolution. As a result, we are able to experimentally benchmark the stability of STA+HQC against NHQC in the same platform. The flexibility and simplicity of our scheme makes it also implementable on other systems, such as nitrogen-vacancy center, quantum dots, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Finally, our scheme can be extended to construct two-qubit holonomic entangling gates, leading to a universal set of STAHQC gates.
Geometric phases accompanying adiabatic quantum evolutions can be used to construct robust quantum control for quantum information processing due to their noise-resilient feature. A significant development along this line is to construct geometric gates using nonadiabatic quantum evolutions to reduce errors due to decoherence. However, it has been shown that nonadiabatic geometric gates are not necessarily more robust than dynamical ones, in contrast to an intuitive expectation. Here we experimentally investigate this issue for the case of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation~(NHQC) and show that conventional NHQC schemes cannot guarantee the expected robustness due to a cross coupling to the states outside the computational space. We implement a new set of constraints for gate construction in order to suppress such cross coupling to achieve an enhanced robustness. Using a superconducting quantum circuit, we demonstrate high-fidelity holonomic gates whose infidelity against quasi-static transverse errors can be suppressed up to the fourth order, instead of the second order in conventional NHQC and dynamical gates. In addition, we explicitly measure the accumulated dynamical phase due to the above mentioned cross coupling and verify that it is indeed much reduced in our NHQC scheme. We further demonstrate a protocol for constructing two-qubit NHQC gates also with an enhanced robustness.
Geometrical phases acquired in cyclic quantum evolutions can be utilized as
natural resources for constructing robust logic gates for quantum information
processing, which was originally proposed through adiabatic changes of the
driving Hamiltonian. Practically, much efforts have been made to shorten the
construction times of geometrical gates, known as non-adiabatic holonomic
quantum computation (NHQC). However, previous NHQC gates require the driving
Hamiltonian to satisfy a set of rather restrictive conditions, reducing the
robustness of the resulting geometric gates against control errors. Here we
show that non-adiabatic geometric gates can be constructed in an alternative
way where the driving Hamiltonian can exhibit a high degree of flexibility for
retaining the robustness of the geometric phases. Consequently, this approach
makes it possible to incorporate most of the existing optimal control methods,
such as dynamical decoupling, composite pulses, and shortcut to adiabaticity,
into the construction of geometrical gates, to further address different types
of errors. Furthermore, this extensible approach of geometric quantum
computation can be applied to various physical platform such as superconducting
qubits and nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. Specifically, we performed numerical
simulation to show how the noise robustness in the recent experimental
implementations [Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 140503 (2017)] and [Nat. Photonics 11,
309 (2017)] of NHQC with NV centers can be significantly improved by our
optimized NHQC approach. These results cover a large class of new techniques
combing the noise robustness of both geometric phase and optimal control
theory.
Nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) is implemented by fast evolution processes in a geometric way to withstand local noises. However, recent works of implementing NHQC are sensitive to the systematic noise and error. Here, we present a path-optimized NHQC (PONHQC) scheme based on the non-Abelian geometric phase, and find that a geometric gate can be constructed by different evolution paths, which have different responses to systematic noises. Due to the flexibility of the PONHQC scheme, we can choose an optimized path that can lead to excellent gate performance. Numerical simulation shows that our optimized scheme can greatly outperform the conventional NHQC scheme, in terms of both fidelity and robustness of the gates. In addition, we propose to implement our strategy on superconducting quantum circuits with decoherence-free subspace encoding with the experiment-friendly two-body exchange interaction. Therefore, we present a flexible NHQC scheme that is promising for the future robust quantum computation.
Nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) has been developed to shorten the construction times of geometric quantum gates. However, previous NHQC gates require the driving Hamiltonian to satisfy a set of rather restrictive conditions, reducing the robustness of the resulting geometric gates against control errors. Here we show that nonadiabatic geometric gates can be constructed in an extensible way, called NHQC+, for maintaining both flexibility and robustness against certain types of noises. Consequently, this approach makes it possible to incorporate most of the existing optimal control methods, such as dynamical decoupling, composite pulses, and a shortcut to adiabaticity, into the construction of single-looped geometric gates. Furthermore, this extensible approach of geometric quantum computation can be applied to various physical platforms such as superconducting qubits and nitrogen-vacancy centers. Specifically, we performed numerical simulation to show how the noise robustness in recent experimental implementations [Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 140503 (2017)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.119.140503; Nat. Photonics 11, 309 (2017)NPAHBY1749-488510.1038/nphoton.2017.40] can be significantly improved by our NHQC+.approach. These results cover a large class of new techniques combing the noise robustness of both geometric phase and optimal control theory.