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Nature Communications

Exact broadband excitation of two-level systems by mapping spins to springs

Jr-Shin Li, Justin Ruths, Steffen J. Glaser

Published Aug 30, 2017• 26 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Designing accurate and high-fidelity broadband pulses is an essential component in conducting quantum experiments across fields from protein spectroscopy to quantum optics. However, constructing exact and analytic broadband pulses remains unsolved due to the nonlinearity and complexity of the underlying spin system dynamics. Here, we present a nontrivial dynamic connection between nonlinear spin and linear spring systems and show the surprising result that such nonlinear and complex pulse design problems are equivalent to designing controls to steer linear harmonic oscillators under optimal forcing. We derive analytic broadband π/2 and π pulses that perform exact, or asymptotically exact, excitation and inversion over a defined bandwidth, and also with bounded amplitude. This development opens up avenues for pulse sequence design and lays a foundation for understanding the control of two-level systems.Coherent control of two-level systems is crucial for achieving fidelity in spectroscopy and quantum computing, but inherent nonlinearities and parameter variation have, to date, required an approximate, numerical approach. Here, Li et al. show how to map a spin ensemble to a spring model so analytic pulses can be designed using linear methods.

DOI
10.1038/s41467-017-00441-7

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Designing accurate and high-fidelity broadband pulses is an essential component in conducting quantum experiments across fields from protein spectroscopy to quantum optics. However, constructing exact and analytic broadband pulses remains unsolved due to the nonlinearity and complexity of the underlying spin system dynamics. Here, we present a nontrivial dynamic connection between nonlinear spin and linear spring systems and show the surprising result that such nonlinear and complex pulse design problems are equivalent to designing controls to steer linear harmonic oscillators under optimal forcing. We derive analytic broadband π/2 and π pulses that perform exact, or asymptotically exact, excitation and inversion over a defined bandwidth, and also with bounded amplitude. This development opens up avenues for pulse sequence design and lays a foundation for understanding the control of two-level systems.Coherent control of two-level systems is crucial for achieving fidelity in spectroscopy and quantum computing, but inherent nonlinearities and parameter variation have, to date, required an approximate, numerical approach. Here, Li et al. show how to map a spin ensemble to a spring model so analytic pulses can be designed using linear methods.
Many key aspects of control of quantum systems involve manipulating a large quantum ensemble exhibiting variation in the value of parameters characterizing the system dynamics. Developing electromagnetic pulses to produce a desired evolution in the presence of such variation is a fundamental and challenging problem in this research area. We present such robust pulse designs as an optimal control problem of a continuum of bilinear systems with a common control function. We map this control problem of infinite dimension to a problem of polynomial approximation employing tools from geometric control theory. We then adopt this new notion and develop a unified computational method for optimal pulse design using ideas from pseudospectral approximations, by which a continuous-time optimal control problem of pulse design can be discretized to a constrained optimization problem with spectral accuracy. Furthermore, this is a highly flexible and efficient numerical method that requires low order of discretization and yields inherently smooth solutions. We demonstrate this method by designing effective broadband π/2 and π pulses with reduced rf energy and pulse duration, which show significant sensitivity enhancement at the edge of the spectrum over conventional pulses in 1D and 2D NMR spectroscopy experiments.
Realizing coherent quantum computation requires precise and robust manipulation of quantum systems through quantum control protocols. Most quantum control techniques rely on heuristic methods for designing the driving pulses that steer the system towards a target state. Such methods are often based on brute-force optimization and offer limited understanding of the solution landscape. In contrast, quantum algorithms offer a rich body of analytical methods with rigorous error guarantees for implementing unitary and non-unitary transformations, which suggests a promising direction for developing new approaches to quantum control. Among various such algorithms, quantum signal processing (QSP) has emerged as a powerful framework for quantum algorithm design, implementation, and optimization. However, its potential for quantum control remains largely unexplored. In this work, we establish QSP-Control, an analytical framework for quantum control of qubit-oscillator dynamics. We focus on dispersively coupled qubit-oscillator systems and employ the QSP formalism to mitigate unwanted nonlinear effects arising from cross-Kerr interactions. In addition, we develop constructions for precise manipulation of Fock states by designing Fock-state-selective operators, based on structural parallels between the Jaynes-Cummings interaction and QSP. These findings demonstrate how several practically relevant problems in quantum control can be mapped to forms amenable to QSP, offering both a systematic design framework and an interpretable perspective on quantum control.
High fidelity and robustness in population inversion is very desirable for many quantum control applications. We expand composite pulse schemes developed for two-level dynamics and present an analytic solution for the coherent evolution of an N-level quantum system with SU(2) symmetry, for achieving high fidelity and robust population inversion. Our approach offers a platform for accurate steering of the population transfer in physical multi-level systems, which is crucial for fidelity in quantum computation and achieving fundamental excitations in nuclear magnetic resonances and atomic physics. We also introduce and discuss the geometrical trajectories of these dynamics on the Majorana sphere as an interpretation, allowing us to gain physical insight on the dynamics of many-body or high-dimensional quantum systems.
We introduce high-fidelity passband (PB) composite pulse sequences constructed by concatenation of recently derived arbitrarily large and arbitrarily accurate broadband B\mathcal{B}B and narrowband N\mathcal{N}N composite sequences. Our PB sequences allow us to produce flexible and tunable nearly rectangular two-state inversion profiles as a function of the individual pulse area because the width and the rectangularity of these profiles can be adjusted at will. Moreover, these PB sequences suppress excitation around pulse area 0 and $2\ensuremath{\pi}$, and suppress deviations from complete population inversion around pulse area $\ensuremath{\pi}$ to arbitrarily high orders. These features make them a valuable tool for high-fidelity qubit operations in the presence of relatively strong amplitude noise. We construct two types of PB pulses: N(B)\mathcal{N}(\mathcal{B})N(B), in which a broadband pulse is nested into a narrowband pulse, and B(N)\mathcal{B}(\mathcal{N})B(N), in which a narrowband pulse is nested into a broadband pulse; the latter sequences deliver narrower profiles. We derive exact analytic formulas for the composite phases of the PB pulses and exact analytic formulas for the inversion profiles. These formulas allow an easy estimation of the experimental resources needed for any desired qubit inversion profile.
Abstract High-fidelity control of spin ensemble dynamics is essential for many research areas, spanning from quantum computing and radio-frequency (RF) engineering to NMR spectroscopy and imaging. However, attaining robust and high-fidelity spin operations remains an unmet challenge. Using an evolutionary algorithm and artificial intelligence (AI), we designed new RF pulses with customizable spatial or temporal field inhomogeneity compensation. Compared with the standard RF shapes, the new AI-generated pulses show superior performance for bandwidth, robustness, and tolerance to field imperfections. As a benchmark, we constructed a spin entanglement operator for the weakly coupled two-spin-1/2 system of 13CHCl3, achieving high-fidelity transformations under multiple inhomogeneity sources. We then generated band-selective and ultra-broadband RF pulses typical of biomolecular NMR spectroscopy. When implemented in multipulse NMR experiments, the AI-generated pulses significantly increased the sensitivity of medium-size and large protein spectra relative to standard pulse sequences. Finally, we applied the new pulses to typical imaging experiments, showing a remarkable tolerance to changes in the RF field. These AI-generated RF pulses can be directly implemented in quantum information, NMR spectroscopy of biomolecules, magnetic resonance imaging techniques for in vivo and materials sciences.