NMR Characterization and Control of Noisy Quantum Systems

Sambuddha Chattopadhyay, Dries Sels, Eugene Demler

C. Negrevergne

Denis‐Alexandre Trottier

Quantum computers offer the possibility of solving some problems more efficiently than their classical counterparts. The current forerunner in the experimental demonstration of quantum algorithms is Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). Known for its implementations at liquid state, NMR quantum computing consists of computing on nuclear spins. In the liquid crystal state, dipolar couplings are available, offering an increased clock frequency and a faster recycling of algorithms. Here investigated is the cost at which this comes, namely, a more complicated internal Hamiltonian, making the system harder to characterize and harder to control. In this thesis I present new methods for characterizing the Hamiltonian of dipolar coupled spin systems, and I report experimental results of characterizing an oriented 6-spin system. I then present methods and results concerning the quantum optimal control of this same spin system. Finally, I present experiments and simulations regarding the certification of computational quantum gates implemented in that same dipolar coupled spin system.

T. S. Mahesh

Fatemeh Khashami, Stefan Glöggler

We investigate quantum entanglement in two-spin-1/2 NMR systems at thermal equilibrium under external magnetic fields. We derive closed-form analytical expressions for the entanglement of the system and show how the entanglement depends on temperature and magnetic field strength, resulting in a threshold temperature beyond which entanglement vanishes. We demonstrate that at zero temperature, the system exhibits a quantum critical point, characterized by non-analytic behavior in the measure of entanglement. We further develop analytical criterion for level crossing, which serves as a condition for identifying quantum critical points in both homonuclear and heteronuclear systems, and apply it to multiple settings to analyze their quantum critical points. We establish a direct link between the quantum entanglement quantifier and experimentally accessible NMR observables, enabling entanglement to be quantified through NMR signal processing. This provides a practical framework for characterizing quantum correlations using standard NMR experiments. These findings provide insights into the thermal control of quantum features, with implications for quantum-enhanced NMR, low-temperature spectroscopy, and emerging quantum technologies.

Martin Laforest

Quantum information processing has been the subject of countless discoveries since the early 1990's. It is believed to be the way of the future for computation: using quantum systems permits one to perform computation exponentially faster than on a regular classical computer. Unfortunately, quantum systems that not isolated do not behave well. They tend to lose their quantum nature due to the presence of the environment. If key information is known about the noise present in the system, methods such as quantum error correction have been developed in order to reduce the errors introduced by the environment during a given quantum computation. In order to harness the quantum world and implement the theoretical ideas of quantum information processing and quantum error correction, it is imperative to understand and quantify the noise present in the quantum processor and benchmark the quality of the control over the qubits. Usual techniques to estimate the noise or the control are based on quantum process tomography (QPT), which, unfortunately, demands an exponential amount of resources. \n \nThis thesis presents work towards the characterization of noisy processes in an efficient manner. The protocols are developed from a purely abstract setting with no system-dependent variables. To circumvent the exponential nature of quantum process tomography, three different efficient protocols are proposed and experimentally verified. The first protocol uses the idea of quantum error correction to extract relevant parameters about a given noise model, namely the correlation between the dephasing of two qubits. Following that is a protocol using randomization and symmetrization to extract the probability that a given number of qubits are simultaneously corrupted in a quantum memory, regardless of the specifics of the error and which qubits are affected. Finally, a last protocol, still using randomization ideas, is developed to estimate the average fidelity per computational gates for single and multi qubit systems. \n \nEven though liquid state NMR is argued to be unsuitable for scalable quantum information processing, it remains the best test-bed system to experimentally implement, verify and develop protocols aimed at increasing the control over general quantum information processors. For this reason, all the protocols described in this thesis have been implemented in liquid state NMR, which then led to further development of control and analysis techniques.