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Journal of Physics Conference Series

Reinforcement Learning Based Control of Coherent Transport by Adiabatic Passage of Spin Qubits

Riccardo Porotti, Dario Tamascelli, Marcello Restelli, Enrico Prati

Published Sep 1, 2019• 12 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Several tasks involving the determination of the time evolution of a system of solid state qubits require stochastic methods in order to identify the best sequence of gates and the time of interaction among the qubits. The major success of deep learning in several scientific disciplines has suggested its application to quantum information as well. Thanks to its capability to identify best strategy in those problems involving a competition between the short term and the long term rewards, reinforcement learning (RL) method has been successfully applied, for instance, to discover sequences of quantum gate operations minimizing the information loss. In order to extend the application of RL to the transfer of quantum information, we focus on Coherent Transport by Adiabatic Passage (CTAP) on a chain of three semiconductor quantum dots (QD). This task is usually performed by the so called counter-intuitive sequence of gate pulses. Such sequence is capable of coherently transfer an electronic population from the first to the last site of an odd chain of QDs, by leaving the central QD unpopulated. We apply a technique to find nearly optimal gate pulse sequence without explicitly give any prior knowledge of the underlying physical system to the RL agent. Using the advantage actor-critic algorithm, with a small neural net as function approximator, we trained a RL agent to choose the best action at every time step of the physical evolution to achieve the same results previously found only by ansatz solutions.

DOI
10.1088/1742-6596/1275/1/012019

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Abstract Some problems in physics can be handled only after a suitable ansatz solution has been guessed, proving to be resilient to generalization. The coherent transport of a quantum state by adiabatic passage through an array of semiconductor quantum dots is an excellent example of such a problem, where it is necessary to introduce a so-called counterintuitive control sequence. Instead, the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique has proven to be able to solve very complex sequential decision-making problems, despite a lack of prior knowledge. We show that DRL discovers a control sequence that outperforms the counterintuitive control sequence. DRL can even discover novel strategies when realistic disturbances affect an ideal system, such as detuning or when dephasing or losses are added to the master equation. DRL is effective in controlling the dynamics of quantum states and, more generally, whenever an ansatz solution is unknown or insufficient to effectively treat the problem.
The progress in machine learning during the last decade has had a considerable impact on many areas of science and technology, including quantum technology. This work explores the application of reinforcement learning (RL) methods to the quantum control problem of state transfer in a single qubit. The goal is to create an RL agent that learns an optimal policy and thus discovers optimal pulses to control the qubit. The most crucial step is to mathematically formulate the problem of interest as a Markov decision process (MDP). This enables the use of RL algorithms to solve the quantum control problem. Deep learning and the use of deep neural networks provide the freedom to employ continuous action and state spaces, offering the expressivity and generalization of the process. This flexibility helps to formulate the quantum state transfer problem as an MDP in several different ways. All the developed methodologies are applied to the fundamental problem of population inversion in a qubit. In most cases, the derived optimal pulses achieve fidelity equal to or higher than 0.9999, as required by quantum computing applications. The present methods can be easily extended to quantum systems with more energy levels and may be used for the efficient control of collections of qubits and to counteract the effect of noise, which are important topics for quantum sensing applications.
We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) scheme for feedback quantum control within the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA).We reformulate the QAOA variational minimization as a learning task, where an RL agent chooses the control parameters for the unitaries, given partial information on the system.Such an RL scheme finds a policy converging to the optimal adiabatic solution of the quantum Ising chain that can also be successfully transferred between systems with different sizes, even in the presence of disorder.This allows for immediate experimental verification of our proposal on more complicated models: the RL agent is trained on a small control system, simulated on classical hardware, and then tested on a larger physical sample.
The use of reinforcement learning (RL) in the design of quantum control strategies for pulse level control of NISQ era quantum devices is attracting growing interest. Model-free RL, not requiring preexisting knowledge of the physical system, acts as a black-box optimization tool well suited for noisy devices. In this work, we provide a simulation-based analysis of the performance of model-free RL for state preparation and qubit gate design in a challenging setup: indirect control of NV nuclear spins in a spin-bath. In particular, the spin-bath is modeled via the generalized cluster correlation expansion accounting for magnetic impurities and intra-bath interactions. We analyze the performance of the RL agents by performing simulations with minimally observable environments and noisy, sparse rewards as introduced in (Phys. Rev. X 12, 011059), and compare them to other state-of-the-art black-box optimization tools.
Abstract High-fidelity control of one- and two-qubit gates past the error correction threshold is an essential ingredient for scalable quantum computing. We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to find entangling protocols for semiconductor-based singlet-triplet qubits in a double quantum dot. Despite the presence of realistically modelled experimental constraints, such as various noise contributions and finite rise-time effects, we demonstrate that an RL agent can yield performative protocols, while avoiding the model-biases of traditional gradient-based methods. We optimise our RL approach for different regimes and tasks, including training from simulated process tomography reconstruction of unitary gates, and investigate the nuances of RL agent design.
High-fidelity control of one- and two-qubit gates past the error correction threshold is an essential ingredient for scalable quantum computing. We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to find entangling protocols for semiconductor-based singlet-triplet qubits in a double quantum dot. Despite the presence of realistically modelled experimental constraints, such as various noise contributions and finite rise-time effects, we demonstrate that an RL agent can yield performative protocols, while avoiding the model-biases of traditional gradient-based methods. We optimise our RL approach for different regimes and tasks, including training from simulated process tomography reconstruction of unitary gates, and investigate the nuances of RL agent design.