Physical implementation of quantum-information processing by liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, using weakly coupled spin-
21 nuclei of a molecule, is well established. Nuclei with
spin>1/2 oriented in liquid-crystalline matrices is another possibility. Such systems have multiple qubits per nuclei and large quadrupolar couplings resulting in well separated lines in the spectrum. So far, creation of pseudopure states and logic gates has been demonstrated in such systems using transition selective radio-frequency pulses. In this paper we report two developments. First, we implement a quantum algorithm that needs coherent superposition of states. Second, we use evolution under quadrupolar coupling to implement multiqubit gates. We implement the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm on a spin-
23 (2 qubit) system. The controlled-NOT operation needed to implement this algorithm has been implemented here by evolution under the quadrupolar Hamiltonian. To the best of our knowledge, this method has been implemented for the first time in quadrupolar systems. Since the quadrupolar coupling is several orders of magnitude greater than the coupling in weakly coupled spin-
21 nuclei, the gate time decreases, increasing the clock speed of the quantum computer.
Residual dipolar couplings can be used to increase the number of qubits for quantum information processing. We have used molecules containing 3, 5 and 8 spins oriented in a liquid crystal matrix, and exploited the residual dipolar coupling to demonstrate quantum information processing in them. Transition assignment is performed using HET-Z-COSY experiment and qubit addressability is achieved by transition selective pulses. It is expected that using this protocol higher qubits can be achieved.
For the implementations reported in this work, evolution under the internal Hamiltonian was not explored. It is however interesting to investigate how effectively the evolution under internal Hamiltonian can be manipulated to implement quantum algorithms in these systems. Recently an approach has been reported in this direction, where a new method of preparing pseudopure states in oriented systems by exciting selected multiple quantum using evolution under effective dipolar Hamiltonian, has been demonstrated [24].