Controlled interactions, quantum noise and entanglement in systems for quantum information processing

Nayeli Zuniga-Hansen

In principle a quantum system could be used to simulate another quantum system. The purpose of such a simulation would be to obtain information about problems which are difficult to simulate on a classical computer due to the exponential increase of the Hilbert space with the size of the system, and which cannot be readily measured or controlled in an experiment. A quantum simulator is, however, an open quantum system that will interact with the surrounding environment, which in this case are other particles in the system, and will be implemented using imperfect controls, making it subject to noise. It has been suggested that noise does not need to be controlled to the same extent as it must be for general quantum information processing. However, the effects of noise in quantum simulations are not well understood and how best to treat them in most cases is not known. In the present work we study an existing quantum algorithm for the simulation of the one-dimensional Fano-Anderson model. This algorithm was proposed for a liquid-state NMR device. We examine models of noise in the evolution using different initial states in the original model. We also add interacting spins to simulate realistic situation where an environment of spins is present. We find that states which are entangled with their environment, and sometimes correlated but not necessarily entangled have an evolution which is described by maps which are not completely positive. We discuss the conditions for this to occur and also the implications.

Samuel L. Braunstein

Andrew G. White, Daniel F. V. James, William J. Munro +1 more

B. P. Lanyon, Petar Jurcevic, Cornelius Hempel +4 more

Quantum systems in mixed states can be unentangled and yet still nonclassically correlated. These correlations can be quantified by the quantum discord and might provide a resource for quantum information processing tasks. By precisely controlling the interaction of two ionic qubits with their environment, we investigate the capability of noise to generate discord. Firstly, we show that noise acting on only one quantum system can generate discord between two. States generated in this way are restricted in terms of the rank of their correlation matrix. Secondly, we show that classically correlated noise processes are capable of generating a much broader range of discordant states with correlation matrices of any rank. Our results show that noise processes prevalent in many physical systems can automatically generate nonclassical correlations and highlight fundamental differences between discord and entanglement.

Zeilinger

Ali Abu-Nada, Moataz A. Salhab

A common assumption in open quantum systems in general is that the noise induced by the environment, due to the continuous interaction between a quantum system and its environment, is responsible for the disappearance of quantum properties of this quantum system. Interestingly, we show that an environment can be engineered and controlled to direct an arbitrary quantum system towards a maximally entangled state and thus can be considered as a resource for quantum information processing. Barreiro et.al. [Nature 470, 486 (2011)] demonstrated this idea experimentally using an open-system quantum simulator up to five trapped ions . In this paper, we direct an arbitrary initial mixed state of two and four qubits, which is interacting with its environment, into a maximally entangled state . We use QASM simulator and also an IBM Q real processor, with and without errors mitigating, to investigate the effect of the noise on the preparation of the initial mixed state of the qubits in addition to the population of the target state.