We analyze in detail the so-called pushing gate for trapped ions, introducing a time dependent harmonic approximation for the external motion. We show how to extract the average fidelity for the gate from the resulting semi-classical simulations. We characterize and quantify precisely all types of errors coming from the quantum dynamics and reveal for the first time that slight nonlinearities in the ion-pushing force can have a dramatic effect on the adiabaticity of gate operation. By means of quantum optimal control techniques, we show how to suppress each of the resulting gate errors in order to reach a high fidelity compatible with scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing.
We show how entanglement shared between encoder and decoder can simplify the theory of quantum error correction. The entanglement-assisted quantum codes we describe do not require the dual-containing constraint necessary for standard quantum error correcting codes, thus allowing us to ``quantize all of classical linear coding theory. In particular, efficient modern classical codes that attain the Shannon capacity can be made into entanglement-assisted quantum codes attaining the hashing bound (closely related to the quantum capacity). For systems without large amounts of shared entanglement, these codes can also be used as catalytic codes, in which a small amount of initial entanglement enables quantum communication.
Successful implementation of a fault-tolerant quantum computation on a system of qubits places severe demands on the hardware used to control the many-qubit state. It is known that an accuracy threshold $P_{a}$ exists for any quantum gate that is to be used in such a computation. Specifically, the error probability $P_{e}$ for such a gate must fall below the accuracy threshold: $P_{e} < P_{a}$. Estimates of $P_{a}$ vary widely, though $P_{a}sim 10^{-4}$ has emerged as a challenging target for hardware designers. In this paper we present a theoretical framework based on neighboring optimal control that takes as input a good quantum gate and returns a new gate with better performance. We illustrate this approach by applying it to all gates in a universal set of quantum gates produced using non-adiabatic rapid passage that has appeared in the literature. Performance improvements are substantial, both for ideal and non-ideal controls. Under suitable conditions detailed below, all gate error probabilities fall well below the target threshold of $10^{-4}$.
In multi-qubit system, correlated errors subject to unwanted interactions with other qubits is one of the major obstacles for scaling up quantum computers to be applicable. We present two approaches to correct such noise and demonstrate with high fidelity and robustness. We use spectator and intruder to discriminate the environment interacting with target qubit in different parameter regime. Our proposed approaches combines analytical theory and numerical optimization, and are general to obtain smooth control pulses for various qubit systems. Both theory and numerical simulations demonstrate to correct these errors efficiently. Gate fidelities are generally above $0.9999$ over a large range of parameter variation for a set of single-qubit gates and two-qubit entangling gates. Comparison with well-known control waveform demonstrates the great advantage of our solutions.
We study how well topological quantum codes can tolerate coherent noise caused by systematic unitary errors such as unwanted $Z$-rotations. Our main result is an efficient algorithm for simulating quantum error correction protocols based on the 2D surface code in the presence of coherent errors. The algorithm has runtime $O(n^2)$, where $n$ is the number of physical qubits. It allows us to simulate systems with more than one thousand qubits and obtain the first error threshold estimates for several toy models of coherent noise. Numerical results are reported for storage of logical states subject to $Z$-rotation errors and for logical state preparation with general $SU(2)$ errors. We observe that for large code distances the effective logical-level noise is well-approximated by random Pauli errors even though the physical-level noise is coherent. Our algorithm works by mapping the surface code to a system of Majorana fermions.
We report the realization of an elementary quantum processor based on a linear crystal of trapped ions. Each ion serves as a quantum bit (qubit) to store the quantum information in long lived electronic states. We present the realization of single-qubit and of universal two-qubit logic gates. The qwo-qubit operation relies on the coupling of the ions through their collective quantized motion. A detailed description of the setup and the methods is included.