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arXiv:quant-ph/0406239 · The Journal of Chemical Physics

Quantum process tomography of the quantum Fourier transform

Yaakov S. Weinstein, Timothy F. Havel, Joseph Emerson, Nicolas Boulant, Marcos Saraceno, Seth Lloyd, David G. Cory

Published Sep 27, 2004• 178 citations
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Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1063/1.1785151

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The most significant achievements of this project were: (1) Development and validation of the hardware and software needed to implement "strongly modulating pulses", by which high precision quantum gates can be obtain in realistic systems of up to 12 qubits; (2) A detailed analysis and evaluation of a 3-qubit quantum Fourier transform via full quantum process tomography; (3) An extensive set of mathematical and computational techniques to accomplish these goals, including Hadamard products, the real density matrix, and methods of fitting superoperators to experimental data; (4) Creation of a 3-qubit "noiseless subsystem", of a Bell state on two 2-qubit decoherence-free subspaces (DFS), and the invention of "partial" pseudopure states which will enable us to demonstrate robust methods for controlling multi-DFS-qubit systems by NMR; (5) Implementation of several quantum chaotic maps, and the discovery that these provide a scalable approach to determining the magnitude and kind of errors present in complex quantum computations; (6) The invention of a "spin amplifier", by which entanglement can be used to enable single spin measurement, and a small-scale demonstration by NMR; (7) Experiments demonstrating that the foregoing advances enable implementation of complex entangling unitary and decoherent operations, culminating in creation of a 12-qubit CAT state.
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.
Quantum process tomography is a procedure by which the unknown dynamical evolution of an open quantum system can be fully experimentally characterized. We demonstrate explicitly how this procedure can be implemented with a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer. This allows us to measure the fidelity of a controlled-NOT logic gate and to experimentally investigate the error model for our computer. Based on the latter analysis, we test an important assumption underlying many models of quantum error correction, the independence of errors on different qubits.
NMR quantum computing with qubit systems represented by nuclear spins (I=12) in small molecules in liquids has led to the most successful experimental quantum information processors so far. We use the quadrupolar spin-32 sodium nuclei of a NaNO3 single crystal as a virtual two-qubit system. The large quadrupolar coupling in comparison with the environmental interactions and the usage of strongly modulating pulses allow us to manipulate the system fast enough and at the same time keeping the decoherence reasonably slow. The experimental challenge is to characterize the "calculation" behavior of the quantum processor by process tomography which is here adapted to the quadrupolar spin system. The results of a selection of quantum gates and algorithms are presented as well as a detailed analysis of experimental results.
In the present work the first virtual 2 Qubit solid state NMR quantum processor, using a spin- 3/2 Na quadrupolar nucleus in a NaNO3 single crystal, is presented. Methods from liquid NMR quantum information processing, like strongly modulating pulses, are adopted to the quadrupolar spin system to implement the unitary operations and to generate pseudo pure states. Experimentally a set of quantum algorithms as well as the decoherence process is characterized by quantum process tomography which is developed for the quadrupolar spin system. A detailed analyses of the basic conditions of the experimental quantum process tomography procedure is presented, showing that even in such non-Markovian systems this method is valid.
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.