The task of decoupling, i.e., removing unwanted internal couplings of a quantum system and its couplings to an environment, plays an important role in quantum control theory. There are many efficient decoupling schemes based on combinatorial concepts such as orthogonal arrays, difference schemes, and Hadamard matrices. So far these combinatorial decoupling schemes have relied on the ability to effect sequences of instantaneous, arbitrarily strong control Hamiltonians (bang-bang controls). To overcome the shortcomings of bang-bang control, Viola and Knill proposed a method called ``Eulerian decoupling'' that allows the use of bounded-strength controls for decoupling. However, their method was not directly designed to take advantage of the local structure of internal couplings and couplings to an environment that typically occur in multipartite quantum systems. In this paper we define a combinatorial structure called Eulerian orthogonal array. It merges the desirable properties of orthogonal arrays and Eulerian cycles in Cayley graphs (that are the basis of Eulerian decoupling). We show that this structure gives rise to decoupling schemes with bounded-strength control Hamiltonians that can be used to remove both internal couplings and couplings to an environment of a multipartite quantum system. Furthermore, we show how to construct Eulerian orthogonal arrays having good parameters in order to obtain efficient decoupling schemes.
We address the task of switching off the Hamiltonian of a system by removing all internal and system-environment couplings. We propose dynamical decoupling schemes that use only bounded-strength controls for quantum many-body systems with local system Hamiltonians and local environmental couplings. To do so, we introduce the combinatorial concept of balanced-cycle orthogonal arrays (BOAs) and show how to construct them from classical error-correcting codes. The derived decoupling schemes may be useful as a primitive for more complex schemes, e.g., for Hamiltonian simulation. For the case of n qubits and a two-local Hamiltonian, the length of the resulting decoupling scheme scales as O(n logn), improving over the previously best-known schemes that scaled quadratically with n. More generally, using BOAs constructed from families of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes, we show that bounded-strength decoupling for any ℓ-local Hamiltonian, where ℓ ≥ 2, can be achieved using decoupling schemes of length at most O(nℓ-1log n).
Decoupling schemes are used in quantum information processing to selectively switch off unwanted interactions in a multipartite Hamiltonian. A decoupling scheme consists of a sequence of local unitary operations which are applied to the system's qudits and alternate with the natural time evolution of the Hamiltonian. Several constructions of decoupling schemes have been given in the literature. Here we focus on two such schemes. The first is based on certain triples of submatrices of Hadamard matrices that are closed under pointwise multiplication (see Leung, “Simulation and reversal of
n-qubit Hamiltonians using Hadamard matrices,” J. Mod. Opt., vol. 49, pp. 1199–1217, 2002), the second uses orthogonal arrays (see Stollsteimer and Mahler, “Suppression of arbitrary internal couplings in a quantum register,” Phys. Rev. A., vol. 64, p. 052301, 2001). We show that both methods lead to the same class of decoupling schemes. We extend the first method to
2-local qudit Hamiltonians, where
dgeq2. Furthermore, we extend the second method to
t-local qudit Hamiltonians, where
tgeq2and
dgeq2, by using orthogonal arrays of strength
t. We also establish a characterization of orthogonal arrays of strength
tby showing that they are equivalent to decoupling schemes for
t-local Hamiltonians which have the property that they can be refined to have time-slots of equal length. The methods used to derive efficient decoupling schemes are based on classical error-correcting codes.
We propose a general procedure for implementing dynamical decoupling of quantum systems without requiring arbitrarily strong, impulsive control actions. This is accomplished by designing continuous decoupling propagators according to Eulerian paths in the decoupling group for the system. Such Eulerian decoupling schemes offer two important advantages over their impulsive counterparts: they are able to enforce the same dynamical symmetrization but with more realistic control resources and, at the same time, they are intrinsically tolerant against a large class of systematic implementation errors.
We propose dynamical control schemes for Hamiltonian simulation in many-body quantum systems that avoid instantaneous control operations and rely solely on realistic bounded-strength control Hamiltonians . Each simulation protocol consists of periodic repetitions of a basic control block, constructed as a modification of an 'Eulerian decoupling cycle,' that would otherwise implement a trivial (zero) target Hamiltonian. For an open quantum system coupled to an uncontrollable environment, our approach may be employed to engineer an effective evolution that simulates a target Hamiltonian on the system while suppressing unwanted decoherence to the leading order, thereby allowing for dynamically corrected simulation . We present illustrative applications to both closed- and open-system simulation settings, with emphasis on simulation of non-local (two-body) Hamiltonians using only local (one-body) controls . In particular, we provide simulation schemes applicable to Heisenberg-coupled spin chains exposed to general linear decoherence, and show how to simulate Kitaevʼs honeycomb lattice Hamiltonian starting from Ising-coupled qubits, as potentially relevant to the dynamical generation of a topologically protected quantum memory. Additional implications for quantum information processing are discussed.
Introduction In this chapter we continue the introduction to dynamical decoupling techniques for open quantum systems that was started in Chapter 4. Here we focus on the construction of efficient schemes for dynamical decoupling and we highlight some combinatorial constructions. Efficiency of decoupling schemes is measured in terms of the number of control operations to be applied to the system. This number should be small, ideally a polynomial in the number of qubits in the system. If we assume that the quantum system is governed by a general Hamiltonian H S , having interactions involving any subset of the qubits, then any scheme that achieves decoupling of H S is necessarily inefficient in the above sense. The efficient schemes we consider here arise in physically realistic situations where there are much more stringent restrictions on the types of interactions. The most important example is the case of pair-interaction Hamiltonians. These Hamiltonians can be expressed as sums of interaction terms that involve at most two qubits. While there is a large body of work on dynamical decoupling schemes for pair-interaction Hamiltonians [S90, EBW94,WHH68, H76], which historically has been used mainly in the context of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) theory, the past few years have seen a development of new techniques for decoupling that are based on group theory. We therefore call such techniques, or rather the pulse sequences that an experimenter can apply to a given Hamiltonian in order to selectively switch off unwanted couplings, combinatorial decoupling schemes.
Decoupling the interactions in a spin network governed by a pair-interaction Hamiltonian is a well-studied problem. Combinatorial schemes for decoupling and for manipulating the couplings of Hamiltonians have been developed which use selective pulses. In this paper we consider an additional requirement on these pulse sequences: as few {\em different} control operations as possible should be used. This requirement is motivated by the fact that optimizing each individual selective pulse will be expensive, i. e., it is desirable to use as few different selective pulses as possible. For an arbitrary
d-dimensional system we show that the ability to implement only two control operations is sufficient to turn off the time evolution. In case of a bipartite system with local control we show that four different control operations are sufficient. Turning to networks consisting of several
d-dimensional nodes which are governed by a pair-interaction Hamiltonian, we show that decoupling can be achieved if one is able to control a number of different control operations which is logarithmic in the number of nodes.