Decoherence is the fundamental obstacle limiting the performance of quantum information processing devices. The problem of transmitting a quantum state (known or unknown) from one place to another is of great interest in this context. In this work, by following the recent theoretical proposal, we study an application of quantum state-dependent pre- and post-processing unitary operations for protecting the given (multi-qubit) quantum state against the effect of decoherence acting on all qubits. We observe the increase in the fidelity of the output quantum state both in a quantum emulation experiment, where all protecting unitaries are perfect, and in a real experiment with a cloud-accessible quantum processor, where protecting unitaries themselves are affected by the noise. We expect the considered approach to be useful for analyzing capabilities of quantum information processing devices in transmitting known quantum states. We also demonstrate the applicability of the developed approach for suppressing decoherence in the process of distributing a two-qubit state over remote physical qubits of a quantum processor.
Decoherence is the fundamental obstacle limiting the performance of quantum information processing devices. The problem of transmitting a quantum state (known or unknown) from one place to another is of great interest in this context. In this work, by following the recent theoretical proposal, we study an application of quantum state-dependent pre- and post-processing unitary operations for protecting the given (multi-qubit) quantum state against the effect of decoherence acting on all qubits. We observe the increase in the fidelity of the output quantum state both in a quantum emulation experiment, where all protecting unitaries are perfect, and in a real experiment with a cloud-accessible quantum processor, where protecting unitaries themselves are affected by the noise. We expect the considered approach to be useful for analyzing capabilities of quantum information processing devices in transmitting known quantum states. We also demonstrate the applicability of the developed approach for suppressing decoherence in the process of distributing a two-qubit state over remote physical qubits of a quantum processor.
Decoherence is a fundamental obstacle to the implementation of large-scale and low-noise quantum information-processing devices. We suggest an approach for suppressing errors by employing preprocessing and postprocessing unitary operations, which precede and follow the action of a decoherence channel. In contrast to quantum error correction and measurement-based methods, the suggested approach relies on specifically designed unitary operators for a particular state without the need in ancillary qubits or postselection procedures. We consider the case of decoherence channels acting on a single qubit belonging to a many-qubit state. Preprocessing and postprocessing operators can be either individual, which is acting on the qubit effected by the decoherence channel only, or collective, which is acting on the whole multiqubit state. We give a classification of possible strategies for the protection scheme, analyze them, and derive expressions for the optimal unitary operators providing the maximal value of the fidelity regarding initial and final states. Specifically, we demonstrate the equivalence of the schemes where one of the unitary operations is individual while the other is collective. We then consider the realization of our approach for the basic decoherence models, which include single-qubit depolarizing, dephasing, and amplitude damping channels. We also demonstrate that the decoherence robustness of multiqubit states for these decoherence models is determined by the entropy of the reduced state of the qubit undergoing the decoherence channel.
Decoherence-free subspaces protect quantum information from the effects of noise that is correlated across the physical qubits used to implement them. Given the ability to impose suitable Hamiltonians upon such a multi-qubit system, one can also implement a set of logical gates which enables universal computation on this information without compromising this protection. Real physical systems, however, seldom come with the correct Hamiltonians built-in, let alone the ability to turn them off and on at will. In the course of our development of quantum information processing devices based on liquid-state NMR, we have found the task of operating on quantum information encoded in decoherence-free subspaces rather more challenging than is commonly assumed. This contribution presents an overview of these challenges and the methods we have developed for overcoming them in practice. These methods promise to be broadly applicable to many of the physical systems proposed for the implementation of quantum information processing devices.
This dissertation addresses the issue of noise in quantum information processing devices. It is common knowledge that quantum states are particularly fragile to the effects of noise. In order to perform scalable quantum computation, it is necessary to suppress effective noise to levels which depend on the size of the computation. Various theoretical proposals have discussed how this can be achieved, under various assumptions about properties of the noise and the availability of qubits. We discuss new approaches to the suppression of noise, and propose experimental protocols characterizing the noise. \n \nIn the first part of the dissertation, we discuss a number of applications of teleportation to fault-tolerant quantum computation. We demonstrate how measurement-based quantum computation can be made inherently fault-tolerant by exploiting its relationship to teleportation. We also demonstrate how continuous variable quantum systems can be used as ancillas for computation with qubits, and how information can be reliably teleported between these different systems. Building on these ideas, we discuss how the necessary resource states for teleportation can be prepared by allowing quantum particles to be scattered by qubits, and investigate the feasibility of an implementation using superconducting circuits. \n \nIn the second part of the dissertation, we propose scalable experimental protocols for extracting information about the noise. We concentrate on information which has direct practical relevance to methods of noise suppression. In particular, we demonstrate how standard assumptions about properties of the noise can be tested in a scalable manner. The experimental protocols we propose rely on symmetrizing the noise by random application of unitary operations. Depending on the symmetry group use, different information about the noise can be extracted. We demonstrate, in particular, how to estimate the probability of a small number of qubits being corrupted, as well as how to test for a necessary condition for noise correlations. We conclude by demonstrating how, without relying on assumptions about the noise, the information obtained by symmetrization can also be used to construct protective encodings for quantum states.
We propose and analyze a robust quantum-state transfer protocol by the use of a combination of coherent quantum coupling and decoherence-free subspaces in a coupled quantum spin chain. Under decoherence, an arbitrary unknown quantum state embedded in a decoherence-free subspace can be perfectly transferred through a noisy channel being weakly coupled to two end registers. The method protects quantum information from both the channel noise and the environmental decoherence. A special case of utilizing two physical qubits to encode one logical qubit is considered as an example and the robustness is confirmed by numerical performances.
Remote entanglement will inevitably decrease due to the interactions between quantum systems and their environments. Therefore protecting remote entanglement against decoherence is of great importance in realizing quantum communication and quantum comp utation. In this paper, we demonstrate that decoherence caused by weak-measurement-induced damping can be effectively suppressed by adding local unitary operation series on each qubit. The results show that the entanglement of the output state can approach that of the state before amplitude damping. The most distinct advantage of this entanglement protection scheme is that any unitary operation (except the identity operation) has this entanglement reversal effect on the amplitude-damped states. Furthermore, in each local unitary operation series, all the operations can be different from one other, and all the time intervals between any two adjacent operations can be different too. In addition, there is no need for the two remote users to synchronize their operations. Unlike most of the previous schemes, we do not assume the instantaneous local unitary operation, and each operation has a duration. All these advantages suggest that this remote entanglement protection scheme is much simpler and feasible than the previous ones, and we hope it can be implemented in the near future. Recently, Y. S. Kim et al. [Nat. Phys. 8, 117 (2012)] pointed out that ``pre-weak measurement + amplitude damping + bit-flipping operation + post-weak measurement'' can actively combat specific decoherence. By combing our proposal with Kim et al.'s scheme, the protection performance can be greatly improved by replacing the bit-flipping operation with an arbitrary rotational operation around the x axis, the number of the operations as well as the interval between any two adjacent operations all can be different, and the application range of the scheme can be greatly broadened.
The distribution of entangled quantum systems among the nodes of a network is a key task at the basis of the development of quantum technologies, e.g., quantum communication, quantum computation, etc. Many efforts have been devoted to identify strategies, based on pre- and post-processing operations or decoherence-free subspaces, to prevent the deterioration of such exotic correlations. However, all these approaches loose their usefulness when the noise level affecting the system surpasses a certain minimal threshold that leads to an entanglement-breaking dynamics. Here we attack this problem in the context of discrete- and continuous-time description of the system dynamics, providing some explicit examples in the context of qubit channels.