Quantum systems of infinite dimension, such as bosonic oscillators, provide vast resources for quantum sensing. Yet, a general theory on how to manipulate such bosonic modes for sensing beyond parameter estimation is unknown. We present a general algorithmic framework, quantum signal processing interferometry (QSPI), for quantum sensing at the fundamental limits of quantum mechanics by generalizing Ramsey-type interferometry. Our QSPI sensing protocol relies on performing nonlinear polynomial transformations on the oscillator's quadrature operators by generalizing quantum signal processing (QSP) from qubits to hybrid qubit-oscillator systems. We use our QSPI sensing framework to make efficient binary decisions on a displacement channel in the single-shot limit. Theoretical analysis suggests the sensing accuracy, given a single-shot qubit measurement, scales inversely with the sensing time or circuit depth of the algorithm. We further concatenate a series of such binary decisions to perform parameter estimation in a bit-by-bit fashion. Numerical simulations are performed to support these statements. Our QSPI protocol offers a unified framework for quantum sensing using continuous-variable bosonic systems beyond parameter estimation and establishes a promising avenue toward efficient and scalable quantum control and quantum sensing schemes beyond the NISQ era.
Quantum systems of infinite dimension, such as bosonic oscillators, provide vast resources for quantum sensing. Yet, a general theory on how to manipulate such bosonic modes for sensing beyond parameter estimation is unknown. We present a general algorithmic framework, quantum signal processing interferometry (QSPI), for quantum sensing at the fundamental limits of quantum mechanics by generalizing Ramsey-type interferometry. Our QSPI sensing protocol relies on performing nonlinear polynomial transformations on the oscillator's quadrature operators by generalizing quantum signal processing (QSP) from qubits to hybrid qubit-oscillator systems. We use our QSPI sensing framework to make efficient binary decisions on a displacement channel in the single-shot limit. Theoretical analysis suggests the sensing accuracy, given a single-shot qubit measurement, scales inversely with the sensing time or circuit depth of the algorithm. We further concatenate a series of such binary decisions to perform parameter estimation in a bit-by-bit fashion. Numerical simulations are performed to support these statements. Our QSPI protocol offers a unified framework for quantum sensing using continuous-variable bosonic systems beyond parameter estimation and establishes a promising avenue toward efficient and scalable quantum control and quantum sensing schemes beyond the NISQ era.
Making sense of the world happens through receiving and processing signals, whether it be sound, light, or other waves that interact with us. The fields of nuclear magnetic resonance and digital signal processing each built a rigorous language for manipulating and extracting information from signals of particular types. Quantum signal processing (QSP) connects these two traditions, providing a unified algebraic framework for understanding how quantum systems are transformed by both classical and quantum signals. QSP provides a systematic framework for characterizing possible transformations. QSP was developed for qubit systems, but physical quantum systems are rarely two-level and the full richness of high-dimensional Hilbert spaces has remained largely unexplored. This thesis extends and applies QSP in two directions: from qubits to high-dimensional systems such as finite-level qudits and infinite-dimensional oscillators and from static signals to signals that include continuous-time noise processes. We will also show how QSP for qudits leads to novel experimental applications in trapped-ion systems. One type of high-dimensional system is a qubit coupled to an oscillator, and a qubit-oscillator qudit can be formed and universally controlled using only a limited set of interactions. In this qubit-oscillator space, a bosonic version of QSP allows novel incarnations of quantum algorithms and sensing. The quantum Fourier transform can be performed by clever conversion of information in a many-qubit system into a single oscillator, and an interferometric protocol uses binary decisions from a qubit to sense a signal affecting the oscillator. Another type of high-dimensional system is a qudit made from the electronic levels of an atom. This thesis presents a new construction of Grover’s algorithm using a qudit in an atomic hyperfine manifold, along with a calibration method that finds accurate QSP pulse parameters for the experiment. For decision algorithms, QSP in qudits enables theoretically perfect decision-making for quantum channel discrimination problems with certain symmetries. In the face of noise, temporal QSP is developed to extend the canonical framework to continuous-time stochastic noise. Combined with Kubo linear-response theory, a noise filter function description emerges which formalizes the optimization of atomic clock performance. These results from qudit, bosonic, and temporal QSP establish QSP as a natural language for high-dimensional quantum control and sensing.
Realizing coherent quantum computation requires precise and robust manipulation of quantum systems through quantum control protocols. Most quantum control techniques rely on heuristic methods for designing the driving pulses that steer the system towards a target state. Such methods are often based on brute-force optimization and offer limited understanding of the solution landscape. In contrast, quantum algorithms offer a rich body of analytical methods with rigorous error guarantees for implementing unitary and non-unitary transformations, which suggests a promising direction for developing new approaches to quantum control. Among various such algorithms, quantum signal processing (QSP) has emerged as a powerful framework for quantum algorithm design, implementation, and optimization. However, its potential for quantum control remains largely unexplored. In this work, we establish QSP-Control, an analytical framework for quantum control of qubit-oscillator dynamics. We focus on dispersively coupled qubit-oscillator systems and employ the QSP formalism to mitigate unwanted nonlinear effects arising from cross-Kerr interactions. In addition, we develop constructions for precise manipulation of Fock states by designing Fock-state-selective operators, based on structural parallels between the Jaynes-Cummings interaction and QSP. These findings demonstrate how several practically relevant problems in quantum control can be mapped to forms amenable to QSP, offering both a systematic design framework and an interpretable perspective on quantum control.
Abstract Combining quantum sensing with quantum computing can lead to quantum computational sensing (QCS) protocols that are able to more efficiently extract task-specific information from physical signals than is possible otherwise. In this paper, we present, in theory and numerical simulations, the application of two quantum algorithms—quantum signal processing and quantum neural networks—to various binary and multiclass machine-learning classification tasks in sensing. Here, sensing operations are interleaved with computing operations, giving rise to nonlinear functions of the sensed signals. Our approach to optimizing QCS protocols takes into account quantum sampling noise and allows us to engineer protocols that can yield accurate results with as few as just a single measurement shot. In all cases, we have been able to show a regime of operation where a quantum computational sensor can achieve higher accuracy than a conventional quantum sensor for a given budget of sensing time, with a simulated accuracy advantage of >20 percentage points for some tasks. We also present protocols for performing nonlinear tasks using Hamiltonian-engineered bosonic systems and quantum signal processing with hybrid qubit-bosonic systems, and empirically show an advantage when the received signal has a limited mean photon number.
A measurement of a single-qubit quantum sensor reveals at most 1 bit of information about the signal that was sensed. To perform a classification task on the signal, the conventional approach is to repeat a sensing protocol many times, averaging the measurement results to obtain a high-precision estimate of the sensed signal, and then to apply classical postprocessing. Quantum computational sensing (QCS) is an alternative approach that breaks with the paradigm of first obtaining a classical estimate of the signal and then computing a function of the estimated signal in postprocessing. QCS instead combines quantum sensing with quantum computing to concentrate information about the signal relevant to the task into the solitary bit revealed by each measurement. Here, we report on the experimental demonstration of QCS where sensing and computing were both performed by the same single superconducting transmon qubit. We consider various binary classification tasks based on static and oscillating magnetic fields induced by current through a flux line. The fields were sensed through a double-junction superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) loop that was part of the qubit. We used a protocol based on quantum signal processing to preprocess the sensed signals in the quantum domain prior to measurement. For tasks on static magnetic fields, our protocol outperformed the conventional baseline of Ramsey-based phase estimation by as much as 15 percentage points. For tasks on oscillating magnetic fields, we classified signal amplitude and frequency with up to 20 and 15 percentage points higher accuracy, respectively, compared to the conventional baseline of optimized dynamical-decoupling protocols. Our results illustrate how quantum computing can enhance quantum sensing even with a minimally sized quantum system subject to the practical limitations of decoherence and error-prone operations.
Quantum computational sensing (QCS) combines quantum sensing with quantum computing to extract task-relevant information from the physical world. QCS can in principle achieve an accuracy advantage for specific tasks versus the alternative of raw-signal estimation using conventional quantum sensing followed by task-specific classical postprocessing. Here we report the experimental demonstration of quantum computational displacement sensing (QCDS) with a superconducting circuit comprising a qubit coupled to an oscillator. We consider binary classification sensing tasks, where the goal is to predict the class label of a single complex-valued displacement sensed once by the oscillator. Rather than estimating the displacement, our computational-sensing protocol -- using parameterized quantum circuits before and after sensing -- attempts to determine the binary class label using quantum processing and map it onto the ground or excited state of the qubit. A single measurement of the qubit directly outputs the prediction. We implemented circuits with up to 24 entangling gates and 38 free parameters, which were trained in silico. We show that increasing the circuit depth systematically improves expressivity and classification accuracy. We experimentally obtained an accuracy advantage over a suite of protocols that first use conventional quantum sensing to estimate the displacement before using classical postprocessing to perform prediction. For certain tasks, our protocol achieves a 15-percentage-points higher classification accuracy than most conventional approaches considered. Our results establish the feasibility of quantum computational sensing with noisy superconducting hardware and illustrate how integrating quantum computation with quantum sensing can enhance performance when the goal is to estimate a property or function of a signal rather than to estimate the signal.
Quantum signal processing (QSP) has emerged as a promising framework to manipulate and determine properties of quantum systems. QSP not only unifies most existing quantum algorithms but also provides tools to discover new ones. Quantum signal processing is applicable to single-qubit or multiqubit systems that can be ``qubitized'' so one can exploit the SU(2) structure of system evolution within special invariant two-dimensional subspaces. In the context of quantum algorithms, this SU(2) structure is artificially imposed on the system through highly nonlocal evolution operators that are difficult to implement on near-term quantum devices. In this work, we propose QSP protocols for the infinite-dimensional Onsager Lie algebra, which is relevant to the physical dynamics of quantum devices that can simulate the transverse-field Ising model. To this end, we consider QSP sequences in the Heisenberg picture, allowing us to exploit the emergent SU(2) structure in momentum space and ``synthesize'' QSP sequences for the Onsager algebra. Our results demonstrate a concrete connection between QSP techniques and noisy intermediate scale quantum protocols. We provide examples and applications of our approach in diverse fields ranging from space-time dual quantum circuits and quantum simulation to quantum control.