A unitary evolution in time may be treated as a curve in the manifold of the special unitary group. The length of such a curve can be related to the energetic cost of the associated computation, meaning a geodesic curve identifies an energetically optimal path. In this work, we employ sub-Riemannian geometry on the manifold of the unitary group to obtain optimally designed Hamiltonians for generating single-qubit gates in an environment with the presence of dephasing noise as well as a two-qubit gate under a time-constant crosstalk interaction. The resulting geodesic equation involves knowing the initial conditions of the parameters that cannot be obtained analytically. We then introduce a random sampling method combined with a minimization function and a cost function to find initial conditions that lead to optimal control fields. We also compare the optimized control fields obtained from the solutions of the geodesic equation with those extracted from the well-known Krotov method. Both approaches provide high-fidelity values for the desired quantum gate implementation, but the geodesic method has the advantage of minimizing the required energy to execute the same task. These findings bring insights for the design of more efficient fields in the arsenal of optimal control theory.
A unitary evolution in time may be treated as a curve in the manifold of the special unitary group. The length of such a curve can be related to the energetic cost of the associated computation, meaning a geodesic curve identifies an energetically optimal path. In this work, we employ sub-Riemannian geometry on the manifold of the unitary group to obtain optimally designed Hamiltonians for generating single-qubit gates in an environment with the presence of dephasing noise as well as a two-qubit gate under a time-constant crosstalk interaction. The resulting geodesic equation involves knowing the initial conditions of the parameters that cannot be obtained analytically. We then introduce a random sampling method combined with a minimization function and a cost function to find initial conditions that lead to optimal control fields. We also compare the optimized control fields obtained from the solutions of the geodesic equation with those extracted from the well-known Krotov method. Both approaches provide high-fidelity values for the desired quantum gate implementation, but the geodesic method has the advantage of minimizing the required energy to execute the same task. These findings bring insights for the design of more efficient fields in the arsenal of optimal control theory.
The main goal of this work is to make use of sub-Riemannian geometry and Pontryagins Maximum Principle to investigate optimal control for computing one- and two-qubit quantum gates, as well as to analyze how the presence of uncontrollable interactions, such as noise and cross-talk operators, influence on the energetic cost of performing such unitary operations. Initially, we study the case of a single noisy qubit. We aim to identify sub-Riemannian geodesics that connect the identity to a unitary operation, sufficiently close to the ideal case, despite the presence of decoherence noise. Next, we expand the study to the case of two qubits, initially only under a time-constant cross-talk interaction, and then, under both: cross-talk interaction and decoherence noise. For all case studies, the main challenge lies in determining the unknown parameters in the geodesic equation for the desired unitary operator. We present a novel method, based on random sampling, for determining such parameters and how they can lead to high-fidelity quantum gates which are synthesized through smooth external control fields.
We introduce a strategy to develop optimally designed fields for continuous dynamical decoupling. Using our methodology, we obtain the optimal continuous field configuration to maximize the fidelity of a general one-qubit quantum gate. To achieve this, considering dephasing-noise perturbations, we employ an auxiliary qubit instead of the boson bath to implement a purification scheme, which results in unitary dynamics. Employing the sub-Riemannian geometry framework for the two-qubit unitary group, we derive and numerically solve the geodesic equations, obtaining the optimal time-dependent control Hamiltonian. Also, due to the extended time required to find solutions to the geodesic equations, we train a neural network on a subset of geodesic solutions, enabling us to promptly generate the time-dependent control Hamiltonian for any desired gate, which is crucial in circuit optimization.
Nielsen et al. have introduced a Riemannian metric on the space of n-qubit unitary operators [M. A. Nielsen, M. R. Dowling, M. Gu and A. C. Doherty, Science 311 (2006), 1133]. The length of the shortest curve connecting the identity I and a desired unitary operator W defined by this metric is essentially equivalent to the quantum gate complexity of W. This metric, and thus, the Riemannian geodesic equation for this metric, has a parameter q called “penalty” that must be large enough. In this paper, we investigate the sub-Riemannian geodesic equation obtained by taking the limit of the Riemannian geodesic equation as q →∞, and show that the Riemannian geodesics for finite q can be explicitly constructed from the sub-Riemannian geodesics. We also present a numerical algorithm for finding the (sub-)Riemannian geodesics connecting I and W, which is based on the Krotov method in optimal control theory. As an example, we give an exact sub-Riemannian geodesic connecting I and the controlled-controlled-Z gate, which is obtained by guessing from the numerical results of the algorithm.
Compared with many other methods which only give time sub-optimal designs, the quantum brachistochrone equation has a great potential to provide accurate time-optimal protocols for essentially any quantum control problem. So far it has been of limited use, however, due to the inadequacy of conventional numerical methods to solve it. Here, using differential geometry, we reformulate the quantum brachistochrone curves as geodesics on the unitary group. This identification allows us to design a numerical method that can efficiently solve the brachistochrone problem by first solving a family of geodesic equations.
Larger multi-qubit quantum gates allow shallower, more efficient quantum circuits, which could decrease the prohibitive effect of noise on algorithms for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and fault-tolerant error correction schemes. Such multi-qubit gates can potentially be generated by time-independent Hamiltonians comprising only physical (one- and two-local) interaction terms. Here, we present an algorithm that finds the time-independent Hamiltonian for a target quantum gate on n qubits by using the geodesic on the Riemannian manifold of SU(2n). Differential programming is used to determine how the Hamiltonian should be updated in order to follow the geodesic to the target unitary as closely as possible. We show that our geodesic algorithm outperforms gradient descent methods for standard multi-qubit gates such as Toffoli and Fredkin. The geodesic algorithm is then used to find previously unavailable multi-qubit gates implementing high fidelity parity checks, which could be used in a wide array of quantum codes and increase the clock speed of fault-tolerant quantum computers. The geodesic algorithm is demonstrated on an example relevant to current experimental hardware, illustrating a circuit speed up.
Superconducting qubits are often based on the first two energy levels of a physical anharmonic LC oscillator. Since the anharmonicity of such systems is usually much lower than the involved energy gaps, population can easily leak to higher energy states. This is what characterizes leakage errors, and it can have multiple sources: from coherent error induced by the control platform to incoherent thermal dissipation. In this work, we adapt an optimal control method based on sub-Riemannian geodesic search in the unitary group for a system consisting of two superconducting qubits with leakage levels. We use the Rx(π/2) rotation for single-qubit operation analysis, and the iSWAP operation for two-qubit analysis. For the former, we find considerable performance improvement in average gate fidelity as well as in the reduction of leakage errors when comparing the obtained optimal pulses with Gaussian and DRAG pulses, especially for short duration pulses. For the iSWAP gate, although leakage error remains roughly the same, we manage to obtain considerably higher fidelities with the cost of requiring a slightly longer time evolution.