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arXiv:quant-ph/0307062 · The Journal of Chemical Physics

Robust control of quantum information

Marco A. Pravia, Nicolas Boulant, Joseph Emerson, Amro M. Farid, Evan M. Fortunato, Timothy F. Havel, R. Martínez, David G. Cory

Published Oct 31, 2003• 94 citations
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Abstract

Errors in the control of quantum systems may be classified as unitary, decoherent, and incoherent. Unitary errors are systematic, and result in a density matrix that differs from the desired one by a unitary operation. Decoherent errors correspond to general completely positive superoperators, and can only be corrected using methods such as quantum error correction. Incoherent errors can also be described, on average, by completely positive superoperators, but can nevertheless be corrected by the application of a locally unitary operation that “refocuses” them. They are due to reproducible spatial or temporal variations in the system’s Hamiltonian, so that information on the variations is encoded in the system’s spatiotemporal state and can be used to correct them. In this paper liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance is used to demonstrate that such refocusing effects can be built directly into the control fields, where the incoherence arises from spatial inhomogeneities in the quantizing static magnetic field as well as the radio-frequency control fields themselves. Using perturbation theory, it is further shown that the eigenvalue spectrum of the completely positive superoperator exhibits a characteristic spread that contains information on the Hamiltonians’ underlying distribution.

DOI
10.1063/1.1619132

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Errors in the control of quantum systems may be classified as unitary, decoherent, and incoherent. Unitary errors are systematic, and result in a density matrix that differs from the desired one by a unitary operation. Decoherent errors correspond to general completely positive superoperators, and can only be corrected using methods such as quantum error correction. Incoherent errors can also be described, on average, by completely positive superoperators, but can nevertheless be corrected by the application of a locally unitary operation that “refocuses” them. They are due to reproducible spatial or temporal variations in the system’s Hamiltonian, so that information on the variations is encoded in the system’s spatiotemporal state and can be used to correct them. In this paper liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance is used to demonstrate that such refocusing effects can be built directly into the control fields, where the incoherence arises from spatial inhomogeneities in the quantizing static magnetic field as well as the radio-frequency control fields themselves. Using perturbation theory, it is further shown that the eigenvalue spectrum of the completely positive superoperator exhibits a characteristic spread that contains information on the Hamiltonians’ underlying distribution.
Errors in the control of quantum systems may be classified as unitary, decoherent, and incoherent. Unitary errors are systematic, and result in a density matrix that differs from the desired one by a unitary operation. Decoherent errors correspond to general completely positive superoperators, and can only be corrected using methods such as quantum error correction. Incoherent errors can also be described, on average, by completely positive superoperators, but can nevertheless be corrected by the application of a locally unitary operation that ‘‘refocuses’’ them. They are due to reproducible spatial or temporal variations in the system’s Hamiltonian, so that information on the variations is encoded in the system’s spatiotemporal state and can be used to correct them. In this paper liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance is used to demonstrate that such refocusing effects can be built directly into the control fields, where the incoherence arises from spatial inhomogeneities in the quantizing static magnetic field as well as the radio-frequency control fields themselves. Using perturbation theory, it is further shown that the eigenvalue spectrum of the completely positive superoperator exhibits a characteristic spread that contains information on the Hamiltonians’ underlying distribution. © 2003 American Institute of Physics. @DOI: 10.1063/1.1619132#
We explore in this paper incoherent processes, which can be modelled as a distribution of unitary processes corresponding to spatially or slowly varying control parameters. Incoherent processes are an important source of errors in quantum information processing. These processes also cause problems and ambiguities for quantum process tomography for which we give examples to illustrate the issues. In an effort to characterize these processes, we develop methods of analysis based on the eigenvalue spectra of superoperators to extract information about the noise source. Examples from nuclear magnetic resonance are provided to illustrate the utility of such information in designing control sequences that directly counteract incoherent noise.
Incoherence in the controlled Hamiltonian is an important limitation on the precision of coherent control in quantum information processing. Incoherence can typically be modeled as a distribution of unitary processes arising from slowly varying experimental parameters. We show how it introduces artifacts in quantum process tomography and we explain how the resulting estimate of the superoperator may not be completely positive. We then go on to attack the inverse problem of extracting an effective distribution of unitaries that characterizes the incoherence via a perturbation theory analysis of the superoperator eigenvalue spectra.
The results of quantum process tomography on a three-qubit nuclear magnetic resonance quantum information processor are presented and shown to be consistent with a detailed model of the system-plus-apparatus used for the experiments. The quantum operation studied was the quantum Fourier transform, which is important in several quantum algorithms and poses a rigorous test for the precision of our recently developed strongly modulating control fields. The results were analyzed in an attempt to decompose the implementation errors into coherent (overall systematic), incoherent (microscopically deterministic), and decoherent (microscopically random) components. This analysis yielded a superoperator consisting of a unitary part that was strongly correlated with the theoretically expected unitary superoperator of the quantum Fourier transform, an overall attenuation consistent with decoherence, and a residual portion that was not completely positive-although complete positivity is required for any quantum operation. By comparison with the results of computer simulations, the lack of complete positivity was shown to be largely a consequence of the incoherent errors which occurred over the full quantum process tomography procedure. These simulations further showed that coherent, incoherent, and decoherent errors can often be identified by their distinctive effects on the spectrum of the overall superoperator. The gate fidelity of the experimentally determined superoperator was 0.64, while the correlation coefficient between experimentally determined superoperator and the simulated superoperator was 0.79; most of the discrepancies with the simulations could be explained by the cumulative effect of small errors in the single qubit gates.
In building a quantum-information processor (QIP), the challenge is to coherently control a large quantum system well enough to perform an arbitrary quantum algorithm and to be able to correct errors induced by decoherence. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) QIPs offer an excellent testbed on which to develop and benchmark tools and techniques to control quantum systems. Two main issues to consider when designing control methods are accuracy and efficiency, for which two complementary approaches have been developed so far to control qubit registers with liquid-state NMR methods. The first applies optimal control theory to numerically optimize the control fields to implement unitary operations on low-dimensional systems with high fidelity. The second technique is based on the efficient optimization of a sequence of imperfect control elements so that implementation of a full quantum algorithm is possible while minimizing error accumulation. This paper summarizes our work in implementing both of these methods. Furthermore, we show that taken together, they form a basis to design quantum control methods for a block-architecture QIP so that large system size is not a barrier to implementing optimal control techniques.
We demonstrate the implementation of an entanglement swapping operation on a four-qubit liquid-state nuclear-magnetic-resonance (NMR) quantum-information processor. We use this experiment as a benchmark to illustrate the progress made in the field of quantum control using strongly modulating pulses and a correction scheme for removing distortions introduced by the nonlinearities in the transmitter and probe circuits. The advances include compensating for incoherent errors caused by the spatial variation of the system Hamiltonian in the NMR sample. The goal of these control sequences is to cause the collapse of the Kraus operator-sum representation of the superoperator into one unitary operator so that the ensemble appears to evolve as one coherent whole.