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Numerical Engineering of Adiabatic Quantum Operations

Seyed Sahand Tabatabaei

Published Jan 23, 2020• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Adiabatic quantum operations are ubiquitous in fields such as quantum information processing, quantum control, and magnetic resonance, where their high fidelity and general robustness renders them an essential tool for various applications. This inherent robustness due to adiabaticity can, however, be impaired in cases where the experimental conditions strictly require very fast evolution times. In this thesis, we provide a gradient-based numerical optimization protocol for efficiently engineering adiabatic operations, allowing for the systematic inclusion of robustness criteria against various experimental non-idealities, including inhomogeneities and uncertainties in system parameters, as well as perturbations in the Hamiltonian such as spin-spin interactions. \nThe protocol is implemented in the context of adiabatic passages for magnetic resonance, and \nit is shown that in addition to conventional adiabatic pulses, it can also generate exceptionally fast operations that although slightly deviate from adiabaticity in limited instances, still lead to a high fidelity. \nThe effectiveness of our method for addressing perturbations is also demonstrated by designing a fast adiabatic passage for dipolar-coupled electrons, and numerically comparing its performance with a pulse without such considerations.

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Adiabatic quantum operations are ubiquitous in fields such as quantum information processing, quantum control, and magnetic resonance, where their high fidelity and general robustness renders them an essential tool for various applications. This inherent robustness due to adiabaticity can, however, be impaired in cases where the experimental conditions strictly require very fast evolution times. In this thesis, we provide a gradient-based numerical optimization protocol for efficiently engineering adiabatic operations, allowing for the systematic inclusion of robustness criteria against various experimental non-idealities, including inhomogeneities and uncertainties in system parameters, as well as perturbations in the Hamiltonian such as spin-spin interactions. \nThe protocol is implemented in the context of adiabatic passages for magnetic resonance, and \nit is shown that in addition to conventional adiabatic pulses, it can also generate exceptionally fast operations that although slightly deviate from adiabaticity in limited instances, still lead to a high fidelity. \nThe effectiveness of our method for addressing perturbations is also demonstrated by designing a fast adiabatic passage for dipolar-coupled electrons, and numerically comparing its performance with a pulse without such considerations.
Adiabatic operations are powerful tools for robust quantum control in numerous fields of physics, chemistry, and quantum information science. The inherent robustness due to adiabaticity can, however, be impaired in applications requiring short evolution times. We present a single versatile gradient-based optimization protocol that combines adiabatic control with effective Hamiltonian engineering in order to design adiabatic operations tailored to the specific imperfections and resources of an experimental setup. The practicality of the protocol is demonstrated by engineering a fast, 2.3 Rabi cycle-long adiabatic inversion pulse for magnetic resonance with built-in robustness to Rabi field inhomogeneities and resonance offsets. The performance and robustness of the pulse is validated in a nanoscale force-detected magnetic resonance experiment on a solid-state sample, indicating an ensemble-averaged inversion accuracy of 99.997%. We further showcase the utility of our protocol by providing examples of adiabatic pulses robust to spin-spin interactions, parameter-selective operations, and operations connecting arbitrary states, each motivated by experiments.
The challenge to fully grasp and to harness the bizarre phenomena which take place in the quantum realm is crucially linked to the ability to engineer and manipulate quantum systems with high precision. The scientific progress in this direction is opening new routes for the investigation of fundamental quantum physics, and it is at the same time paving the way to the development of the first quantum technologies. \n\nThis thesis is dedicated to the search of strategies for high-fidelity and noise-tolerant quantum control.\nA versatile theoretical framework is set up for the design of optimized control protocols based on accelerated adiabatic processes. The benefits of the adiabatic dynamics, rooted in its intrinsic stability versus control imperfections, are released from the requirement of slow evolution: this is achieved thanks to the theoretical construction of accelerating control Hamiltonians which dynamically counteract deviations from the target dynamics. Our framework provides a methodical way to engineer these Hamiltonians by introducing fast modulations of the initially-available control parameters, and it results from the interplay between the theory of counterdiabatic fields and Floquet-Magnus average Hamiltonian theory. As compared to other shortcut-to-adiabaticity strategies, our control method keeps the system always close to the exact adiabatic path while not requiring the implementation of new Hamiltonian couplings. Moreover, the flexibility in the construction of the accelerating Hamiltonians offers a fertile ground for the hybridization with optimal control techniques.\n\nThe general setup is applied to exemplary control problems of relevance in quantum optics and quantum information processing. First, a protocol is designed for the generation of entanglement between effective two-level systems coupled through a transmission line, in the experimental context of circuit quantum electrodynamics. Second, an accelerated version of the widespread technique of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage is presented, which dramatically enlarges its range of applicability for implementations both in the optical and in the microwave regime.\n\nThe results strongly support the potential of the quantum control framework developed in this thesis. In particular, our methodology offers the opportunity to flank high fidelities and small error sensitivity with on-demand adaptability to experimental constraints and the flexibility for integrations with other control techniques. This makes it a valuable resource for applications in many branches of quantum science, with a natural outlet in quantum computation and simulation.
Efficient adiabatic control schemes, where one steers a quantum system along an adiabatic path ensuring minimal excitations while achieving a desired final state, that enable fast, high-fidelity operations are essential for any practical quantum computation. However, current optimization protocols are not universally tractable due to stringent requirements imposed by the microscopic systems encoding the qubit, including complex energy level structures and unwanted transitions, and generally require a trade-off between speed and fidelity of the operation. Here, we address these challenges by developing a general framework for optimal control based on the quantum metric tensor. This framework allows for fast and high-fidelity adiabatic pulses, even for a dense energy spectrum, based solely on the Hamiltonian of the system instead of the time evolution propagator and independent of the size of the underlying Hilbert space. Furthermore, our framework suppresses diabatic transitions and state-dependent crosstalk effects without the need for additional control fields. As an example, we study the adiabatic charge transfer in a double quantum dot to find optimal control pulses with improved performance. We show that for the geometric protocol, the transfer fidelities are lower bounded F>99%\mathcal{F}>99\%F>99% for ultrafast $20~\mbox{ns}$ pulses, regardless of the size of the anti-crossing, while being robust against miscalibration errors and quasistatic noise.
In circuit quantum electrodynamics the coherence of Cooper pairs in superconductors is employed to create macroscopic electric circuits with quantized energy levels. Such circuits can be coupled with each other and exploited as building blocks of a quantum computer. Accurate and robust control of the quantum state in the circuits is a central condition for the operation of the quantum computer and one of the prerequisites for the implementation of complex algorithms used in quantum information processing, such as quantum error correction. In this thesis adiabatic control in circuit quantum electrodynamics is investigated with the focus on manipulating three-level systems. \n \nIn adiabatic control the eigenstates of the system are slowly modified by changing the external control parameters, which govern the evolution of the system. If the changes in the parameters are slow enough, the state of the system follows the eigenstates in the adiabatic basis, thereby realizing the intended operation. The advantage of adiabatic control is its inherent robustness to small errors or noise in the control parameters; the result of the state manipulation only depends on the asymptotic values of the control parameters, but not on their exact values during the process. \n \nShortcuts to adiabaticity can be used to speed up the otherwise slow adiabatic control by introducing a correction pulse that compensates the diabatic losses during the state manipulation. This allows one to overcome the limitation on the speed of the protocol but simultaneously reduces the method's robustness to the variations in the control parameters. If the level of noise in the control parameters is known, using the shortcut it is possible to find the optimal level of robustness which is required to mitigate the noise. \n \nCircuit quantum electrodynamics offers a perfect experimental platform for investigating quantum control due to the possibility of realizing complicated control schemes using microwave electronics. With commercially available digital-to-analog converters the control signals can be digitally created, which enables accurate and coherent control of the quantum circuit. \n \nIn this thesis both theoretical and experimental results on adiabatic control applied to superconducting transmon circuits are presented. It is shown that stimulated Raman adiabatic passage can be used for population transfer in a three-level transmon, which can be further improved using shortcuts to adiabaticity. Furthermore, a scheme for implementing robust superadiabatic rotation gates in transmon is proposed. Finally, it is demonstrated that superconducting qubit can be used as an ultra-sensitive detector of magnetic flux.
In previous implementations of adiabatic quantum algorithms using spin systems, the average Hamiltonian method with Trotter's formula was conventionally adopted to generate an effective instantaneous Hamiltonian that simulates an adiabatic passage. However, this approach had issues with the precision of the effective Hamiltonian and with the adiabaticity of the evolution. In order to address these, we here propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel scheme for adiabatic quantum computation by using the intrinsic Hamiltonian of a realistic spin system to represent the problem Hamiltonian while adiabatically driving the system by an extrinsic Hamiltonian directly induced by electromagnetic pulses. In comparison to the conventional method, we observed two advantages of our approach: improved ease of implementation and higher fidelity. As a showcase example of our approach, we experimentally factor 291311, which is larger than any other quantum factorization known.
We present a robust pulse optimization method for adiabatic population transfer and adiabatic quantum computation. The approach relies on identifying control pulses that keep the evolving quantum system close to its instantaneous ground state. By combining advanced gradient-free optimization tools with specialized cost functions for adiabatic control, it achieves both efficiency and robustness. To demonstrate its generality, we apply the method to three examples involving both atomic and superconducting qubits. We test different optimization cost functions and discretization bases, showing that the approach outperforms ensemble optimization. Finally, to verify its performance on real quantum hardware, we implement digitized adiabatic qubit control using the optimized pulses on the IBM quantum cloud.