Quantum error correction is required to compensate for the fragility of the state of a quantum computer. We report the first experimental implementations of quantum error correction and confirm the expected state stabilization. A precise analysis of the decay behavior is performed in alanine and a full implementation of the error correction procedure is realized in trichloroethylene. In NMR computing, however, a net improvement in the signal to noise would require very high polarization. The experiment implemented the three-bit code for phase errors using liquid state NMR.
Quantum error correction is required to compensate for the fragility of the state of a quantum computer. We report the first experimental implementations of quantum error correction and confirm the expected state stabilization. A precise analysis of the decay behavior is performed in alanine and a full implementation of the error correction procedure is realized in trichloroethylene. In NMR computing, however, a net improvement in the signal to noise would require very high polarization. The experiment implemented the three-bit code for phase errors using liquid state NMR.
Quantum error correction (QEC) is all for naught if it cannot be implemented experimentally in the laboratory. Further, even if it can be implemented in small laboratory experiments, these experiments need not lead to a technology that is scalable to large quantum computers (where large is defined as “big enough to contemporaneously outperform the best classical computer on some problem”). In this chapter we will survey some of the experiments that have been performed to implement QEC. These experiments are all a long way from demonstrating viable QEC, but demonstrate the proof-of-principle methods that will need to be implemented in the future if quantum computation is to be made viable. This chapter deals with experimental implementations whose goal is to implement QEC, and not experiments using passive or open-loop methods, which are covered in Chapter 22. Experiments in liquid-state NMR The first experiments that attempted to perform QEC were performed using room-temperature liquid-state NMR. Liquid-state NMR [CFH97, GC97] is a testbed for quantum computing ideas in which one uses the internal states of coupled nuclear spins from a molecule as the qubits in a quantum computer. In its original and experimentally implemented form, liquid-state NMR is not generally thought to be scalable: the signal used to read out the result of the quantum computation decays exponentially [W97] in the number of qubits in the system and the mixed states produced in these experiments can be shown to possess no quantum entanglement.
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.
Quantum error correcting codes enable the information contained in a quantum state to be protected from decoherence due to external perturbations. Applied to NMR, this procedure does not alter normal relaxation, but rather converts the state of a 'data' spin into multiple quantum coherences involving additional ancilla spins. These multiple quantum coherences relax at differing rates, thus permitting the original state of the data to be approximately reconstructed by mixing them together in an appropriate fashion. This paper describes the operation of a simple, three-bit quantum code in the product operator formalism, and uses geometric algebra methods to obtain the error-corrected decay curve in the presence of arbitrary correlations in the external random fields. These predictions are confirmed in both the totally correlated and uncorrelated cases by liquid-state NMR experiments on 13C-labelled alanine, using gradient-diffusion methods to implement these idealized decoherence models. Quantum error correction in weakly polarized systems requires that the ancilla spins be prepared in a pseudo-pure state relative to the data spin, which entails a loss of signal that exceeds any potential gain through error correction. Nevertheless, this study shows that quantum coding can be used to validate theoretical decoherence mechanisms, and to provide detailed information on correlations in the underlying NMR relaxation dynamics.
Quantum information processing has been the subject of countless discoveries since the early 1990's. It is believed to be the way of the future for computation: using quantum systems permits one to perform computation exponentially faster than on a regular classical computer. Unfortunately, quantum systems that not isolated do not behave well. They tend to lose their quantum nature due to the presence of the environment. If key information is known about the noise present in the system, methods such as quantum error correction have been developed in order to reduce the errors introduced by the environment during a given quantum computation. In order to harness the quantum world and implement the theoretical ideas of quantum information processing and quantum error correction, it is imperative to understand and quantify the noise present in the quantum processor and benchmark the quality of the control over the qubits. Usual techniques to estimate the noise or the control are based on quantum process tomography (QPT), which, unfortunately, demands an exponential amount of resources. \n \nThis thesis presents work towards the characterization of noisy processes in an efficient manner. The protocols are developed from a purely abstract setting with no system-dependent variables. To circumvent the exponential nature of quantum process tomography, three different efficient protocols are proposed and experimentally verified. The first protocol uses the idea of quantum error correction to extract relevant parameters about a given noise model, namely the correlation between the dephasing of two qubits. Following that is a protocol using randomization and symmetrization to extract the probability that a given number of qubits are simultaneously corrupted in a quantum memory, regardless of the specifics of the error and which qubits are affected. Finally, a last protocol, still using randomization ideas, is developed to estimate the average fidelity per computational gates for single and multi qubit systems. \n \nEven though liquid state NMR is argued to be unsuitable for scalable quantum information processing, it remains the best test-bed system to experimentally implement, verify and develop protocols aimed at increasing the control over general quantum information processors. For this reason, all the protocols described in this thesis have been implemented in liquid state NMR, which then led to further development of control and analysis techniques.
Quantum computers are able to operate on coherent superpositions of states, and to isolate a single global property of the set of computed quantities via interference. In principle, this permits them to solve certain problems exponentially faster thana classical computer, but not one has yet succeeded in implementing a true quantum computer on more than two quantum bits. Recently, however, it has been found that an ensemble of independent and identical quantum computers can perform mots of the same feats than a single quantum computer could, while at the same time bringing massive classical parallelism to bear on its computations. Such an ensemble quantum computer can be realized, to a limited extent, by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy on ordinary liquids at room temperature and pressure. This simple implementation depends on special kinds of mixed states, called pseudo-pure states, whose preparation entails a loss of signal that is exponential in the number of spins. While this would appear to limit such an implementation to ca. 8-10 spins in the foreseeable future, NMR spectroscopy has now permitted the first experimental demonstrations of all the basic features of quantum computing. We claim, moreover, that the product operator formalism, on which the theory of NM R spectroscopy is based, provides an efficient framework within which to analyze algorithms and decoherence effects in quantum computing more generally. This is illustrated by presenting our recent experimentally implementation of a quantum error correcting code.