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arXiv:2601.08315 · Physical Review A

Extending Qubit Coherence Time via Hybrid Dynamical Decoupling

Qi Yao, Jun Zhang, Wenxian Zhang, Chaohong Lee

quant-phSubmitted Jan 13, 2026• Announced Jan 14, 2026• 1 citation
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Abstract

Dynamical decoupling (DD) and bath engineering are two parallel techniques employed to mitigate qubit decoherence resulting from their unavoidable coupling to the environment. Here, we present a hybrid DD approach that integrates pulsed DD with bath spin polarization to enhance qubit coherence within the central spin model. This model, which can be realized using GaAs semiconductor quantum dots or analogous quantum simulators, demonstrates a significant extension of the central spin's coherence time by approximately 2 to 3 orders of magnitude that compared with the free-induced decay time, where the dominant contribution from DD and a moderate improvement from spin-bath polarization. This study, which integrates uniaxial dynamical decoupling and auxiliary bath-spin engineering, paves the way for prolonging coherence times in various practical quantum systems, including GaAs/AlGaAs, silicon and Si/SiGe. And this advancement holds substantial promise for applications in quantum information processing.

Journal reference
Phys. Rev. A 113, 032602(2026)
DOI
10.1103/rj8c-tv95
Comments
10 pages, 5 Figures, Welcome to comment

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Dynamical decoupling (DD) and bath engineering are two parallel techniques employed to mitigate qubit decoherence resulting from their unavoidable coupling to the environment. Here, we present a hybrid DD approach that integrates pulsed DD with bath spin polarization to enhance qubit coherence within the central spin model. This model, which can be realized using GaAs semiconductor quantum dots or analogous quantum simulators, demonstrates a significant extension of the central spin's coherence time by approximately 2 to 3 orders of magnitude that compared with the free-induced decay time, where the dominant contribution from DD and a moderate improvement from spin-bath polarization. This study, which integrates uniaxial dynamical decoupling and auxiliary bath-spin engineering, paves the way for prolonging coherence times in various practical quantum systems, including GaAs/AlGaAs, silicon and Si/SiGe. And this advancement holds substantial promise for applications in quantum information processing.
Avoiding the loss of coherence of quantum mechanical states is an important prerequisite for quantum information processing. Dynamical decoupling (DD) is one of the most effective experimental methods for maintaining coherence, especially when one can access only the qubit system and not its environment (bath). It involves the application of pulses to the system whose net effect is a reversal of the system-environment interaction. In any real system, however, the environment is not static, and therefore the reversal of the system-environment interaction becomes imperfect if the spacing between refocusing pulses becomes comparable to or longer than the correlation time of the environment. The efficiency of the refocusing improves therefore if the spacing between the pulses is reduced. Here, we quantify the efficiency of different DD sequences in preserving different quantum states. We use 13C^{13}\mathrm{C}13C nuclear spins as qubits and an environment of 1H^{1}\mathrm{H}1H nuclear spins as the environment, which couples to the qubit via magnetic dipole-dipole couplings. Strong dipole-dipole couplings between the proton spins result in a rapidly fluctuating environment with a correlation time of the order of 100 $\ensuremath{\mu}$s. Our experimental results show that short delays between the pulses yield better performance if they are compared with the bath correlation time. However, as the pulse spacing becomes shorter than the bath correlation time, an optimum is reached. For even shorter delays, the pulse imperfections dominate over the decoherence losses and cause the quantum state to decay.
The coherence time of an electron spin decohered by the nuclear spin environment in a quantum dot can be substantially increased by subjecting the electron to suitable dynamical decoupling sequences. We analyze the performance of high-level decoupling protocols by using a combination of analytical and exact numerical methods, and by paying special attention to the regimes of large interpulse delays and long-time dynamics, which are outside the reach of standard average Hamiltonian theory descriptions. We demonstrate that dynamical decoupling can remain efficient far beyond its formal domain of applicability, and find that a protocol exploiting concatenated design provides best performance for this system in the relevant parameter range. In situations where the initial electron state is known, protocols able to completely freeze decoherence at long times are constructed and characterized. The impact of system and control nonidealities is also assessed, including the effect of intrabath dipolar interaction, magnetic field bias and bath polarization, as well as systematic pulse imperfections. While small bias field and small bath polarization degrade the decoupling fidelity, enhanced performance and temporal modulation result from strong applied fields and high polarizations. Overall, we find that if the relative errors of the control pulse flip angles do not exceed 3%, decoupling protocols can still prolong the coherence time by up to 2 orders of magnitude.
Quantum computers, which process information encoded in quantum mechanical systems, hold the potential to solve some of the hardest computational problems. A substantial obstacle for the further development of quantum computers is the fact that the lifetime of quantum information is usually too short to allow practical computation. A promising method for increasing the lifetime, known as dynamical decoupling (DD), consists of applying a periodic series of inversion pulses to the quantum bits. In the present review, we give an overview of this technique and compare different pulse sequences proposed earlier. We show that pulse imperfections, which are always present in experimental implementations, limit the performance of DD. The loss of coherence due to the accumulation of pulse errors can even exceed the perturbation from the environment. This effect can be largely eliminated by a judicious design of pulses and sequences. The corresponding sequences are largely immune to pulse imperfections and provide an increase of the coherence time of the system by several orders of magnitude.
Dynamical decoupling (DD) is a powerful method for controlling arbitrary open quantum systems. In quantum spin control, DD generally involves a sequence of timed spin flips (π rotations) arranged to either average out or selectively enhance coupling to the environment. Experimentally, errors in the spin flips are inevitably introduced, motivating efforts to optimize error-robust DD. Here we invert this paradigm: by introducing particular control "errors" in standard DD, namely, a small constant deviation from perfect π rotations (pulse adjustments), we show we obtain protocols that retain the advantages of DD while introducing the capabilities of quantum state readout and polarization transfer. We exploit this nuclear quantum state selectivity on an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to efficiently polarize the ^{13}C quantum bath. The underlying physical mechanism is generic and paves the way to systematic engineering of pulse-adjusted protocols with nuclear state selectivity for quantum control applications.
In quantum information processing, it is vital to protect the coherence of qubits in noisy environments. Dynamical decoupling (DD), which applies a sequence of flips on qubits and averages the qubit-environment coupling to zero, is a promising strategy compatible with other desired functionalities, such as quantum gates. Here, we review the recent progresses in theories of dynamical decoupling and experimental demonstrations. We give both semiclassical and quantum descriptions of the qubit decoherence due to coupling to noisy environments. Based on the quantum picture, a geometrical interpretation of DD is presented. The periodic Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill DD and the concatenated DD are reviewed, followed by a detailed exploration of the recently developed Uhrig DD, which employs the least number of pulses in an unequally spaced sequence to suppress the qubit-environment coupling to a given order of the evolution time. Some new developments and perspectives are also discussed.
Dynamical decoupling (DD) is an active and effective method for suppressing decoherence of a quantum system from its environment. In contrast to the nominal biaxial DD, this work presents a uniaxial decoupling protocol that requires a significantly reduced number of pulses and a much lower bias field satisfying the "magic" condition. We show this uniaxial DD protocol works effectively in a number of model systems of practical interest, e.g., a spinor atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in stray magnetic fields (classical noise), or an electron spin coupled to nuclear spins (quantum noise) in a semiconductor quantum dot. It requires only half the number of control pulses and a 10-100 times lower bias field for decoupling as normally employed in the above mentioned illustrative examples, and the overall efficacy is robust against rotation errors of the control pulses. The uniaxial DD protocol we propose shines new light on coherent controls in quantum computing and quantum information processing, quantum metrology, and low field nuclear magnetic resonance.