No Arabic abstract
Due to omnipresent environmental interferences, quantum coherences inevitably undergo irreversible transformations over certain time-scales, thus leading to the loss of encoded information. This process, known as decoherence, has been a major obstacle in realizing efficient quantum information processors. Understanding the mechanism of decoherence is crucial in developing tools to inhibit it. Here we utilize a method proposed by Cory and co-workers [Phys. Rev. A 67, 062316 (2003)] to engineer artificial decoherence in the system qubits by randomly perturbing their surrounding ancilla qubits. Using a two qubit nuclear magnetic resonance quantum register, we characterize the artificial decoherence by noise spectroscopy and quantum process tomography. Further, we study the efficacy of dynamical decoupling sequences in suppressing the artificial decoherence. Here we describe the experimental results and their comparisons with theoretical simulations.
We measure and characterize anomalous motional decoherence of an atomic ion confined in the lowest quantum levels of a novel rf ion trap that features moveable electrodes. The scaling of decoherence rate with electrode proximity is measured, and when the electrodes are cooled from 300 K to 150 K, the decoherence rate is suppressed by an order of magnitude. This provides direct evidence that anomalous motional decoherence of trapped ions stems from microscopic noisy potentials on the electrodes. These observations are relevant to quantum information processing schemes using trapped ions or other charge-based systems.
Taming decoherence is essential in realizing quantum computation and quantum communication. Here we experimentally demonstrate that decoherence due to amplitude damping can be suppressed by exploiting quantum measurement reversal in which a weak measurement and the reversing measurement are introduced before and after the decoherence channel, respectively. We have also investigated the trade-off relation between the degree of decoherence suppression and the channel transmittance.
Projective measurements are an essential element of quantum mechanics. In most cases, they cause an irreversible change of the quantum system on which they act. However, measurements can also be used to stabilize quantum states from decay processes, which is known as the quantum Zeno effect (QZE). Here, we demonstrate this effect for the case of a superposition state of a nuclear spin qubit, using an ancilla to perform the measurement. As a result, the quantum state of the qubit is protected against dephasing without relying on an ensemble nature of NMR experiments. We also propose a scheme to protect an arbitrary state by using QZE.
The no-knowledge quantum feedback was proposed by Szigeti et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 020407 (2014), as a measurement-based feedback protocol for decoherence suppression for an open quantum system. By continuously measuring environmental noises and feeding back controls on the system, the protocol can completely reverse the measurement backaction and therefore suppress the systems decoherence. However, the complete decoherence cancellation was shown only for the instantaneous feedback, which is impractical in real experiments. Therefore, in this work, we generalize the original work and investigate how the decoherence suppression can be degraded with unavoidable delay times, by analyzing non-Markovian average dynamics. We present analytical expressions for the average dynamics and numerically analyze the effects of the delayed feedback for a coherently driven two-level system, coupled to a bosonic bath via a Hermitian coupling operator. We also find that, when the qubits unitary dynamics does not commute with the measurement and feedback controls, the decoherence rate can be either suppressed or amplified, depending on the delay time.
We investigate cat codes that can correct multiple excitation losses and identify two types of logical errors: bit-flip errors due to excessive excitation loss and dephasing errors due to quantum back-action from the environment. We show that selected choices of logical subspace and coherent amplitude can efficiently reduce dephasing errors. The trade-off between the two major errors enables optimized performance of cat codes in terms of minimized decoherence. With high coupling efficiency, we show that one-way quantum repeaters with cat codes feature drastically boosted secure communication rate per mode compared with conventional encoding schemes, and thus showcase the promising potential of quantum information processing with continuous variable quantum codes.