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Physical Review A

Creating dynamic leakage-free paths using coarse-graining techniques in the presence of decoherence

S. L. Wu, W. Ma, Lian-Ao Wu

Published Sep 13, 2024• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We present a method aimed at protecting unitary dynamics in the presence of decoherence, by integrating leakage elimination operators (LEOs) into the system's evolution to create dynamical leakage-free paths. Deriving the dynamical equation for an open quantum system with general drives can be challenging. Our approach avoids the rotating wave approximation and instead uses the coarse-grained averaging technique to derive a quantum master equation for such systems. The combination of the coarse-graining approach and LEO operators appears suitable to study Markovian control methods. We show that employing LEO pulses in specific subspaces can reduce errors arising from undesired transitions due to decoherence. Notably, satisfactory final fidelity can still be achieved even when the reservoir is at a finite temperature. By looking into the dynamical equation governing the quantum state on the dynamical leakage-free path, we provide analytical insights into the effectiveness of the LEO method in suppressing decoherence effects.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.110.032212

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We present a method aimed at protecting unitary dynamics in the presence of decoherence, by integrating leakage elimination operators (LEOs) into the system's evolution to create dynamical leakage-free paths. Deriving the dynamical equation for an open quantum system with general drives can be challenging. Our approach avoids the rotating wave approximation and instead uses the coarse-grained averaging technique to derive a quantum master equation for such systems. The combination of the coarse-graining approach and LEO operators appears suitable to study Markovian control methods. We show that employing LEO pulses in specific subspaces can reduce errors arising from undesired transitions due to decoherence. Notably, satisfactory final fidelity can still be achieved even when the reservoir is at a finite temperature. By looking into the dynamical equation governing the quantum state on the dynamical leakage-free path, we provide analytical insights into the effectiveness of the LEO method in suppressing decoherence effects.
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Adiabatic evolution is used in a variety of quantum information processing tasks. However, the elimination of errors is not as well developed as it is for circuit model processing. Here, we present a strategy to improve the performance of a quantum adiabatic process by adding leakage elimination operators (LEOs) to the evolution. These are a sequence of pulse controls acting in an adiabatic subspace to eliminate errors by suppressing unwanted transitions. Using the Feshbach PQPQPQ partitioning technique, we obtain an analytical solution for a set of pulse controls. The effectiveness of the LEO is independent of the specific form of the pulse but depends on the average frequency of the control function. By observing that the evolution of the target eigenstate is governed by a periodic function appearing in the integral of the control function, we show that control parameters can be chosen in such a way that the instantaneous eigenstates of the system are unchanged, yet a speedup can be achieved by suppressing transitions. Furthermore, we give the exact expression of the control function for a counter unitary transformation to be used in experiments which provides a clear physical meaning for the LEO, aiding in the implementation.
Decoherence-induced leakage errors can potentially damage physical or logical qubits embedded in a subspace of the entire Hilbert space by coupling them to other system levels. Here we report the first experimental implementation of Leakage Elimination Operators (LEOs) that aims to reduce this undermining. LEOs are a type of dynamical decoupling control that have been previously introduced to counteract leakage from a chosen subspace into the rest of a Hilbert space, and have been widely explored theoretically. Different from other error correction strategies, LEOs are compatible with any gate sequence in a code space, and thus, compatible with universal quantum computation. Using IBM's cloud quantum computer (QC), we design three potentially applicable examples of subspaces in two- and three-qubit Hilbert spaces and derive the explicit forms of the corresponding LEOs for these subspaces. For the first time, we experimentally demonstrate that these LEOs significantly suppress leakage. The results also show that the LEO time-scale condition can be satisfied with noise in the IBM's cloud QC and pave a way for quantum setups to get rid of leakage trouble.
Dynamical decoupling operations have been shown to reduce errors in quantum information processing. Leakage from an encoded subspace to the rest of the system space is a particularly serious problem for which leakage elimination operators (LEOs) were introduced. Here we provide an analysis of nonideal pulses, rather than the well-understood idealization or bang-bang controls. Under realistic conditions, we show that these controls will provide the same protection from errors as idealized controls. Our work indicates that the effectiveness of LEOs depends on the integral of the pulse sequence in the time domain, which has been missing because of the idealization of pulse sequences. Our results are applied to a three-level system for the nitrogen-vacancy centers under an external magnetic field and are illustrated by the fidelity dynamics of LEO sequences, ranging from regular rectangular pulses, random pulses, and even disordered (noisy) pulses.
This is a derivation of the quantum-optical master equation using coarse-graining of time, which aims at exploring Markovian evolution from a microscopic perspective. Here, coarse-graining refers to finding an approximate evolution operator by integrating over a time step Δ t , and considering the field states to be approximated by a similarly coarse-grained basis. By using these ideas and keeping the field states coarse-grained throughout the derivation, I explore the past-future independence of the quantum white noise formalism explicitly. Namely, that a quantum-optical system interacting with a vacuum field may be viewed as sequentially interacting with a series of initially uncorrelated and temporally coarse-grained vacuum states—this process leads to correlations only between the system and the time bins which have interacted with the system in the past, along with a Markovian evolution of the reduced system state. The derivation here may also be viewed in terms of a type of quantum-mechanical path integral.
We present a first-principles derivation of the Markovian semigroup master equation without invoking the rotating-wave approximation (RWA). Instead we use a time coarse-graining approach that leaves us with a free time-scale parameter, which we can optimize. Comparing this approach to the standard RWA-based Markovian master equation, we find that significantly better agreement is possible using the coarse-graining approach, for a three-level model coupled to a bath of oscillators, whose exact dynamics we can solve for at zero temperature. The model has the important feature that the RWA has a nontrivial effect on the dynamics of the populations. We show that the two different master equations can exhibit strong qualitative differences for the population of the energy eigenstates even for such a simple model. The RWA-based master equation misses an important feature which the coarse-graining-based scheme does not. By optimizing the coarse-graining time scale the latter scheme can be made to approach the exact solution much more closely than the RWA-based master equation.