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arXiv:2201.13319

Quantum thermodynamic methods to purify a qubit on a quantum processing unit

Andrea Solfanelli, Alessandro Santini, Michele Campisi

Published Jan 1, 2022• 17 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report on a quantum thermodynamic method to purify a qubit on a quantum processing unit (QPU) equipped with (nearly) identical qubits. Our starting point is a three qubit design that emulates the well-known two qubit swap engine. Similar to standard fridges, the method would allow us to cool down a qubit at the expense of heating two other qubits. A minimal modification thereof leads to a more practical three qubit design that allows for enhanced refrigeration tasks, such as increasing the purity of one qubit at the expense of decreasing the purity of the other two. The method is based on the application of properly designed quantum circuits and can therefore be run on any gate model quantum computer. We implement it on a publicly available superconducting qubit based QPU and observe a purification capability down to 200 mK. We identify gate noise as the main obstacle toward practical application for quantum computing.

DOI
10.1116/5.0091121

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We report on a quantum thermodynamic method to purify a qubit on a quantum processing unit (QPU) equipped with (nearly) identical qubits. Our starting point is a three qubit design that emulates the well-known two qubit swap engine. Similar to standard fridges, the method would allow us to cool down a qubit at the expense of heating two other qubits. A minimal modification thereof leads to a more practical three qubit design that allows for enhanced refrigeration tasks, such as increasing the purity of one qubit at the expense of decreasing the purity of the other two. The method is based on the application of properly designed quantum circuits and can therefore be run on any gate model quantum computer. We implement it on a publicly available superconducting qubit based QPU and observe a purification capability down to 200 mK. We identify gate noise as the main obstacle toward practical application for quantum computing.
Global unitary transformations (OPTSWAPS) that optimally increase the bias of any mixed computation qubit in a quantum system -- represented by a diagonal density matrix -- towards a particular state of the computational basis which, in effect, increases its purity are presented. Quantum circuits that achieve this by implementing the above data compression technique -- a generalization of the 3B-Comp used before -- are described. These circuits enable purity increment in the computation qubit by maximally transferring part of its von Neumann or Shannon entropy to any number of surrounding qubits and are valid for the complete range of initial biases. Using the optswaps, a practicable new method that algorithmically achieves hierarchy-dependent cooling of qubits to their respective limits in an engineered quantum register opened to the heat-bath is delineated. In addition to multi-qubit purification and satisfying two of DiVincenzo's criteria for quantum computation in some architectures, the implications of this work for quantum data compression and quantum thermodynamics are discussed.
Abstract Although classical thermal machines power industries and modern living, quantum thermal engines have yet to prove their utility. Here, we demonstrate a useful quantum absorption refrigerator formed from superconducting circuits. We use it to cool a transmon qubit to a temperature lower than that achievable with any one available bath, thereby resetting the qubit to an initial state suitable for quantum computing. The process is driven by a thermal gradient and is autonomous, requiring no external feedback. The refrigerator exploits an engineered three-body interaction between the target qubit and two auxiliary qudits. Each auxiliary qudit is coupled to a physical heat bath, realized with a microwave waveguide populated with synthesized quasithermal radiation. If the target qubit is initially fully excited, its effective temperature reaches a steady-state level of approximately 22 mK, lower than what can be achieved by existing state-of-the-art reset protocols. Our results demonstrate that superconducting circuits with propagating thermal fields can be used to experimentally explore quantum thermodynamics and apply it to quantum information-processing tasks.
Small quantum absorption refrigerators have recently attracted renewed attention. Here we present a missing design of a two-qubit fridge, the main feature of which is that one of the two machine qubits is itself maintained at a temperature colder than the cold bath. This is achieved by "reversing" the couplings to the baths compared to previous designs, where only a transition is maintained cold. We characterize the working regime and the efficiency of the fridge. We demonstrate the soundness of the model by deriving and solving a master equation. Finally, we discuss the performance of the fridge, in particular the heat current extracted from the cold bath. We show that our model performs comparably to the standard three-level quantum fridge and thus appears appealing for possible implementations of nanoscale thermal machines.
Quantum computing utilizes quantum mechanics to perform computations with superconducting qubits being the more mature technology as of writing in realizing a quantum computer. In this thesis, we describe an implementation of a Quantum Processor Unit (QPU), which is used to execute instructions in the form of microwave pulses on a superconducting qubit device through the use of signal generators and to perform qubit readout. We further extend the QPU as a platform to perform qubit characterization tasks such as spectroscopy and decoherence measurements in order to determine and optimize the working parameters to perform quantum gate operations. We also demonstrate the use of the QPU in performing qubit experiments such as Gauss Sum Factorization in determining the factors of an integer and the Bell Inequality test in examining the entanglement strength between a pair of qubits. We bridge the divide of quantum computation and qubit hardware in the compilation of quantum circuits into microwave pulse sequences for the QPU to execute. The process of compilation, as well as hardware limitations and pre-compilation optimization procedures are discussed. Finally, we show an example of executing a variational quantum algorithm and break down this example in all layers from the quantum circuit provided by the user to the pulse sequence that will be executed on the QPU.
Abstract We discuss a quantum refrigerator to increase the ground state probability of a target qubit whose energy difference between the ground and excited states is less than the thermal energyof its environment. We consider two types of quantum refrigerators: (1) one extra qubit with frequent pulse operations and(2) two extra qubits without them. These two types of refrigerators are evaluated from the viewpoint of quantum thermodynamics. More specifically,we calculate the heat removed from the target qubit, the work done for the system, and the coefficient of performance (COP), the ratio between the heat ant work.We show that the COP of the second type outperforms that of the first one.Our results are useful to design a high-performance quantum refrigerator cooling down a qubit.
We show that quantum absorption refrigerators, which have traditionally been studied as of three qubits, each of which is connected to a thermal reservoir, can also be constructed by using three qubits and two thermal baths, where two of the qubits, including the qubit to be locally cooled, are connected to a common bath. With a careful choice of the system, bath, and qubit-bath interaction parameters within the Born-Markov and rotating-wave approximations, one of the qubits attached to the common bath achieves a cooling in the steady state. We observe that the proposed refrigerator may also operate in a parameter regime where no or negligible steady-state cooling is achieved, but there is considerable transient cooling. The steady-state temperature can be lowered significantly by an increase in the strength of the few-body interaction terms existing due to the use of the common bath in the refrigerator setup. The proposed refrigerator built with three qubits and two baths is shown to provide steady-state cooling for both Markovian qubit-bath interactions between the qubits and canonical bosonic thermal reservoirs, and a simpler reset model for the qubit-bath interactions.