Future quantum technologies rely heavily on good protection of quantum entanglement against environment-induced decoherence. A recent study showed that an extension of Uhrig's dynamical decoupling (UDD) sequence can (in theory) lock an arbitrary but known two-qubit entangled state to the
Nth order using a sequence of
N control pulses [Mukhtar et al., Phys. Rev. A 81, 012331 (2010)]. By nesting three layers of explicitly constructed UDD sequences, here we first consider the protection of unknown two-qubit states as superposition of two known basis states, without making assumptions of the system-environment coupling. It is found that the obtained decoherence suppression can be highly sensitive to the ordering of the three UDD layers and can be remarkably effective with the correct ordering. The detailed theoretical results are useful for general understanding of the nature of controlled quantum dynamics under nested UDD. As an extension of our three-layer UDD, it is finally pointed out that a completely unknown two-qubit state can be protected by nesting four layers of UDD sequences. This work indicates that when UDD is applicable (e.g., when the environment has a sharp frequency cutoff and when control pulses can be taken as instantaneous pulses), dynamical decoupling using nested UDD sequences is a powerful approach for entanglement protection.
Based on a theorem we establish on dynamical decoupling of time-dependent systems, we present a scheme of nested Uhrig dynamical decoupling (NUDD) to protect multiqubit systems in generic quantum baths to arbitrary decoupling orders, using only single-qubit operations. The number of control pulses in NUDD increases polynomially with the decoupling order. For general multilevel systems, this scheme can preserve a set of unitary Hermitian system operators which mutually either commute or anticommute, and hence all operators in the Lie algebra generated from this set of operators, generating an effective symmetry group for the system up to a given order of precision. NUDD can be implemented with pulses of finite amplitude, up to an error in the second order of the pulse durations.
We employ the filter-design perspective and derive the filter functions according to nested Uhrig dynamical decoupling (NUDD) and symmetric dynamical decoupling (SDD) in the pure-dephasing spin-boson model with N qubits. The performances of NUDD and SDD are discussed in detail for a two-qubit system. The analysis shows that (i) SDD outperforms NUDD for the bath with a soft cutoff while NUDD approaches SDD as the cutoff becomes harder; (ii) if the qubits are coupled to a common reservoir, SDD helps to protect the decoherence-free subspace while NUDD destroys it; (iii) when the imperfect control pulses with finite width are considered, NUDD is affected in both the high-fidelity regime and coherence time regime while SDD is affected in the coherence time regime only.