No Arabic abstract
We report a study of the Majorana geometrical representation of a qutrit, where a pair of points on a unit sphere represents its quantum states. A canonical form for qutrit states is presented, where every state can be obtained from a one-parameter family of states via $SO(3)$ action. The notion of spin-1 magnetization which is invariant under $SO(3)$ is geometrically interpreted on the Majorana sphere. Furthermore, we describe the action of several quantum gates in the Majorana picture and experimentally implement these gates on a spin-1 system (an NMR qutrit) oriented in a liquid crystalline environment. We study the dynamics of the pair of points representing a qutrit state under various useful quantum operations and connect them to different NMR operations. Finally, using the Gell Mann matrix picture we experimentally implement a scheme for complete qutrit state tomography.
The quantum Fourier transform (QFT) is a key ingredient of several quantum algorithms and a qudit-specific implementation of the QFT is hence an important step toward the realization of qudit-based quantum computers. This work develops a circuit decomposition of the QFT for hybrid qudits based on generalized Hadamard and generalized controlled-phase gates, which can be implemented using selective rotations in NMR. We experimentally implement the hybrid qudit QFT on an NMR quantum emulator, which uses four qubits to emulate a single qutrit coupled to two qubits.
We experimentally test quantum contextuality of a single qutrit using NMR. The contextuality inequalities based on nine observables developed by Kurzynski et. al. are first reformulated in terms of traceless observables which can be measured in an NMR experiment. These inequalities reveal the contextuality of almost all single-qutrit states. We demonstrate the violation of the inequality on four different initial states of a spin-1 deuterium nucleus oriented in a liquid crystal matrix, and follow the violation as the states evolve in time. We also describe and experimentally perform a single-shot test of contextuality for a subclass of qutrit states whose density matrix is diagonal in the energy basis.
Building a quantum computer is a daunting challenge since it requires good control but also good isolation from the environment to minimize decoherence. It is therefore important to realize quantum gates efficiently, using as few operations as possible, to reduce the amount of required control and operation time and thus improve the quantum state coherence. Here we propose a superconducting circuit for implementing a tunable system consisting of a qutrit coupled to two qubits. This system can efficiently accomplish various quantum information tasks, including generation of entanglement of the two qubits and conditional three-qubit quantum gates, such as the Toffoli and Fredkin gates. Furthermore, the system realizes a conditional geometric gate which may be used for holonomic (non-adiabatic) quantum computing. The efficiency, robustness and universality of the presented circuit makes it a promising candidate to serve as a building block for larger networks capable of performing involved quantum computational tasks.
We present the NMR implementation of a recently proposed quantum algorithm to find the parity of a permutation. In the usual qubit model of quantum computation, speedup requires the presence of entanglement and thus cannot be achieved by a single qubit. On the other hand, a qutrit is qualitatively more quantum than a qubit because of the existence of quantum contextuality and a single qutrit can be used for computing. We use the deuterium nucleus oriented in a liquid crystal as the experimental qutrit. This is the first experimental exploitation of a single qutrit to carry out a computational task.
Three-dimensional entanglement of orbital angular momentum states of an atomic qutrit and a single photon qutrit has been observed. Their full state was reconstructed using quantum state tomography. The fidelity to the maximally entangled state of Schmidt rank 3 exceeds the threshold 2/3. This result confirms that the density matrix cannot be decomposed into ensemble of pure states of Schmidt rank 1 or 2. That is, the Schmidt number of the density matrix must be equal to or greater than 3.