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.
We consider dynamical decoupling schemes in which the qubit is continuously manipulated by a control field at all times. Building on the theory of the Uhrig dynamical decoupling (UDD) sequence and its connections to Chebyshev polynomials, we derive a method of always-on control by expressing the UDD control field as a Fourier series. We then truncate this series and numerically optimize the series coefficients for decoupling, constructing the Chebyshev and Fourier expansion sequence. This approach generates a bounded, continuous control field. We simulate the decoupling effectiveness of our sequence versus a continuous version of UDD for a qubit coupled to fully-quantum and semi-classical dephasing baths and find comparable performance. We derive filter functions for continuous-control decoupling sequences, and we assess how robust such sequences are to noise on control fields. The methods we employ provide a variety of tools to analyze continuous-control dynamical decoupling sequences.
Abstract Dynamical decoupling (DD) is a quantum error-mitigation technique based on applying sequences of control pulses to suppress decoherence. Here we perform a numerical study to compare different DD protocols, namely Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG), Periodic Dynamical Decoupling (PDD), Concatenated Dynamical Decoupling (CDD) and Uhrig Dynamical Decoupling (UDD) applied to three commonly used noise power spectral densities: (i) white, (ii) 1/f, (iii) 1/f 2 and their hybrid combinations. By ignoring qubit relaxation, we simulate these protocols focusing purely on dephasing noise. We then consider independent multi-axial noise with uniaxial control pulses. The effective coherence times T2,eff are extracted for each case and compared with the baseline free induction decay T ∗ 2 [6]. In all these simulations, the time-domain decoherence profiles follow a stretched exponential form ∼ exp −(t/T2,eff) β with the effective coherence times dependent on the noise spectrum considered, the strength of the noise, and the DD sequence employed. An exception is observed for the UDD under specific noise conditions where it cannot be described by a simple stretched exponential decay form.