Robust Quantum Information Processing

Chiara Bagnasco

Published Sep 12, 2014• 0 citations

Abstract

Quantum computers exploit quantum mechanical phenomena as resources to process information.They are therefore far more vulnerable to errors than their classical counterparts.The main obstacle to the practical realization of a working large-scale quantum computer is decoherence, i.e., the process by which a quantum system decays to a classical state through interaction with the environment.We herein discuss two techniques to implement robust quantum information processing, and report on their implementation in a liquid state NMR Quantum Computing experiment.We describe a method to implement a two-qubit gate between spins 2 and 3 of a three-spin linear chain molecule by applying a soft pulse to spin 1, with appropriate choices of the rf-field amplitude ω 1 and duration τ [1].The Bloch-Siegert effect for such a soft pulse is negligible in general, which makes NMR pulse programming and quantum gates design much simpler than with conventional hard π-pulses; it also makes this method suitable for use with both homo-and heteronuclear molecules.We then discuss a simple Operator Quantum Error Correction (OQEC) scheme with three qubits [2].This scheme provides the simplest possible Noiseless Subsystem, in terms of the number of CNOT gates, that is robust against (restricted) fully correlated noise.We demonstrated our OQEC scheme experimentally using a three-qubit NMR Quantum Computer, in which the ancillae are in the maximally mixed state.In this experiment, we made practical use of the soft pulse technique [1] to implement the two-qubit gates in the pulse sequences realizing encoding and decoding operations.

DOI: 10.15100/0002002934

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