Molecular qubits are promising as they can benefit from tailoring and versatile design of chemistry. It is essential to reduce the decoherence of molecular qubits caused by their interactions with the environment. Herein the dynamical decoupling (DD) technique is utilized to combat such decoherence. The coherence time for a transition-metal complex (PPh4)2[Cu(mnt)2] is prolonged from 6.8 μs to 1.4 ms. The ratio of the coherence time and the length of π/2 pulse, defined as the single qubit figure of merit (Q M), reaches 1.4 × 105, which is 40 times greater than what previously reported for this molecule. Our results show that molecular qubits, with milliseconds coherence time, are promising candidates for quantum information processing.
Molecular qubits are promising as they can benefit from tailoring and versatile design of chemistry. It is essential to reduce the decoherence of molecular qubits caused by their interactions with the environment. Herein the dynamical decoupling (DD) technique is utilized to combat such decoherence. The coherence time for a transition-metal complex (PPh4)2[Cu(mnt)2] is prolonged from 6.8 μs to 1.4 ms. The ratio of the coherence time and the length of π/2 pulse, defined as the single qubit figure of merit (Q M), reaches 1.4 × 105, which is 40 times greater than what previously reported for this molecule. Our results show that molecular qubits, with milliseconds coherence time, are promising candidates for quantum information processing.
There are several important solid-state systems, such as defects in solids, superconducting circuits and molecular qubits, for attractive candidates of quantum computations. Molecular qubits, which benefit from the power of chemistry for the tailored and inexpensive synthesis of new systems, face the challenge from decoherence effect. The decoherence effect is due to the molecular qubits' inevitable interactions to their environment. Strategies to overcome decoherence effect have been developed, such as designing a nuclear spin free environment and working at atomic clock transitions. These chemical approaches, however, have some fundamental limitations. For example, chemical approach restricts the ligand selection and design to ligands with zero nuclear magnetic dipole moment, such as carbon, oxygen, and sulfur. Herein, a physical approach, named Dynamical decoupling (DD), is utilized to combat decoherence, while the limitations of the chemical approaches can be avoided. The phase memory time T2 for a transition metal complex has been prolonged to exceed one millisecond (1.4ms) by employing DD. The single qubit figure of merit $Q_M $ reaches $ 1.4\times 10^5$, which is 40 times better than that previously reported value for such system. Our results show that molecular qubits, with milliseconds T2, are promising candidates for quantum information processing.
Optical interfaces that connect long-lived spin qubits to photons are a central requirement for quantum networking and distributed quantum information processing. Currently, solid-state atomic defects are leading candidates due to their inherent spin and optical coherence. Building on these advancements, synthetically tailored molecular systems represent a fundamental change in the field, utilizing precise atomic control and consistent bottom-up assembly. However, the lack of a robust spin-photon interface combining bright fluorescence, high spectral stability, and the persistent spin lifetimes inherent to ground-state systems has prohibited the detection of individual molecular qubits. Here we show that a triplet ground state carbene molecule, embedded within a structurally matched host crystal, functions as a robust spin-photon interface with single-molecule addressability. The system exhibits narrow zero-phonon lines, spectral stability over more than an hour, spin-selective optical transitions and single-molecule optically detected magnetic resonance. Coherent control yields millisecond-scale dynamical-decoupling coherence and tens-of-milliseconds spin relaxation at a temperature of 4.5 K. These results establish molecular qubits as a viable platform for single-emitter quantum optics while preserving the advantages of bottom-up chemical design and processable materials.
In quantum information processing, it is vital to protect the coherence of qubits in noisy environments. Dynamical decoupling (DD), which applies a sequence of flips on qubits and averages the qubit-environment coupling to zero, is a promising strategy compatible with other desired functionalities, such as quantum gates. Here, we review the recent progresses in theories of dynamical decoupling and experimental demonstrations. We give both semiclassical and quantum descriptions of the qubit decoherence due to coupling to noisy environments. Based on the quantum picture, a geometrical interpretation of DD is presented. The periodic Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill DD and the concatenated DD are reviewed, followed by a detailed exploration of the recently developed Uhrig DD, which employs the least number of pulses in an unequally spaced sequence to suppress the qubit-environment coupling to a given order of the evolution time. Some new developments and perspectives are also discussed.
With the power of chemistry for inexpensive synthesis of tailored systems, molecular qubits are attractive candidates for quantum computing. Here decoherence persists as a major obstacle; for its effective suppression, the properties of environmental noise must be elucidated. Traditional noise spectroscopy with spurious harmonics leads to false identification of nuclear spins. The authors demonstrate a protocol for noise-spectrum analysis without spurious harmonics, through dynamical decoupling. This result enables enhanced coherence for molecular qubits, and could be quite significant for quantum information processing based on such systems.
Dynamical decoupling (DD) and bath engineering are two parallel techniques employed to mitigate qubit decoherence resulting from their unavoidable coupling to the environment. Here, we present a hybrid DD approach that integrates pulsed DD with bath spin polarization to enhance qubit coherence within the central spin model. This model, which can be realized using GaAs semiconductor quantum dots or analogous quantum simulators, demonstrates a significant extension of the central spin's coherence time by approximately 2 to 3 orders of magnitude that compared with the free-induced decay time, where the dominant contribution from DD and a moderate improvement from spin-bath polarization. This study, which integrates uniaxial dynamical decoupling and auxiliary bath-spin engineering, paves the way for prolonging coherence times in various practical quantum systems, including GaAs/AlGaAs, silicon and Si/SiGe. And this advancement holds substantial promise for applications in quantum information processing.
One of the fundamental problems of chemistry is the difficulty in determining full quantum mechanical descriptions of molecules. Molecules contain many degrees of freedom and as a result the classical description scales factorially with the number of electrons. One way to overcome this mismatch between quantum and classical pictures is to use one quantum system, a quantum computer, to simulate another. Quantum computation is based upon a two-level system, a qubit, which is analogous to a bit in classical computation. Unlike a classical bit, a qubit can exist in a superposition of quantum states. The interaction between a quantum system and its environment results in the decay of the superposition state of the system into a probability density of classical states [1]. This is known as decoherence. A realistic quantum computer requires qubits with long coherence times; with respect to the achievable gating times, for a formal relation refer to section 1.2.2. The spin echo effect in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) offers a way to increase the coherence time of a qubit and has been studied as a way to mitigate decoherence in quantum computation[2][3]. By applying an appropriate Π pulse to a system under the influence of a large external field, as in NMR, the interaction term of the Hamiltonian between the qubit and environment can be eliminated[3][4]. Periodic implementation of such pulses is known as periodic dynamic decoupling (PDD). Similar to PDD, concatenated dynamic decoupling (CDD) is a periodic pulse sequence which removes the interaction term of the Hamiltonian, however in CDD pulse sequences are recursively embedded within the overall pulse train. Such pulse sequences have been shown theoretically to work for model quantum systems such as GaAs quantum dots, and theoretically such pulse sequences vastly improve the coherence time of a qubit [5]. There have been many calculations showing that by progressively increasing the number of concatenated pulse sequences increasingly longer coherence times can be achieved [6][7]. These techniques have not been tested in the laboratory and experimental implementation of these promising techniques motivates current research. There also continues to be extensive work on developing novel pulse sequences which may improve coherence times even further. The goal of this research is to experimentally determine the coherence times which can be achieved with a trapped calcium atom by applying these pulse sequences.