No Arabic abstract
Hybrid quantum registers, such as electron-nuclear spin systems, have emerged as promising hardware for implementing quantum information and computing protocols in scalable systems. Nevertheless, the coherent control of such systems still faces challenges. Particularly, the lower gyromagnetic ratios of the nuclear spins cause them to respond slowly to control fields, resulting in gate times that are generally longer than the coherence time of the electron spin. Here, we demonstrate a scheme for circumventing this problem by indirect control: We apply a small number of short pulses only to the electron spin and let the full system undergo free evolution under the hyperfine coupling between the pulses. Using this scheme, we realize robust quantum gates in an electron-nuclear spin system, including a Hadamard gate on the nuclear spin and a controlled-NOT gate with the nuclear spin as the target qubit. The durations of these gates are shorter than the electron spin coherence time, and thus additional operations to extend the system coherence time are not needed. Our demonstration serves as a proof of concept for achieving efficient coherent control of electron-nuclear spin systems, such as NV centers in diamond. Our scheme is still applicable when the nuclear spins are only weakly coupled to the electron spin.
Any technology requires precise benchmarking of its components, and the quantum technologies are no exception. Randomized benchmarking allows for the relatively resource economical estimation of the average gate fidelity of quantum gates from the Clifford group, assuming identical noise levels for all gates, making use of suitable sequences of randomly chosen Clifford gates. In this work, we report significant progress on randomized benchmarking, by showing that it can be done for individual quantum gates outside the Clifford group, even for varying noise levels per quantum gate. This is possible at little overhead of quantum resources, but at the expense of a significant classical computational cost. At the heart of our analysis is a representation-theoretic framework that we develop here which is brought into contact with classical estimation techniques based on bootstrapping and matrix pencils. We demonstrate the functioning of the scheme at hand of benchmarking tensor powers of T-gates. Apart from its practical relevance, we expect this insight to be relevant as it highlights the role of assumptions made on unknown noise processes when characterizing quantum gates at high precision.
Nuclear spins in certain solids couple weakly to their environment, making them attractive candidates for quantum information processing and inertial sensing. When coupled to the spin of an optically-active electron, nuclear spins can be rapidly polarized, controlled and read via lasers and radiofrequency fields. Possessing coherence times of several milliseconds at room temperature, nuclear spins hosted by a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond are thus intriguing systems to observe how classical physical rotation at quantum timescales affects a quantum system. Unlocking this potential is hampered by precise and inflexible constraints on magnetic field strength and alignment in order to optically induce nuclear polarization, which restricts the scope for further study and applications. In this work, we demonstrate optical nuclear spin polarization and rapid quantum control of nuclear spins in a diamond physically rotating at $1,$kHz, faster than the nuclear spin coherence time. Free from the need to maintain strict field alignment, we are able to measure and control nuclear spins in hitherto inaccessible regimes, such as in the presence of a large, time-varying magnetic field that makes an angle of more than $100^circ$ to the nitrogen-lattice vacancy axis. The field induces spin mixing between the electron and nuclear states of the qubits, decoupling them from oscillating rf fields. We are able to demonstrate that coherent spin state control is possible at any point of the rotation, and even for up to six rotation periods. We combine continuous dynamical decoupling with quantum feedforward control to eliminate decoherence induced by imperfect mechanical rotation. Our work liberates a previously inaccessible degree of freedom of the NV nuclear spin, unlocking new approaches to quantum control and rotation sensing.
We show how the spin independent scattering between two identical flying qubits can be used to implement an entangling quantum gate between them. We consider one dimensional models with a delta interaction in which the qubits undergoing the collision are distinctly labeled by their opposite momenta. The logical states of the qubit may either be two distinct spin (or other internal) states of a fermion or a boson or two distinct momenta magnitudes of a spinless boson. Our scheme could be added to linear optics-like quantum information processing to enhance its efficiency, and can also aid the scaling of quantum computers based on static qubits without resorting to photons. Three distinct ingredients -- the quantum indistinguishability of the qubits, their interaction, and their dimensional confinement, come together in a natural way to enable the quantum gate.
Significant experimental advances in single-electron silicon spin qubits have opened the possibility of realizing long-range entangling gates mediated by microwave photons. Recently proposed iSWAP gates, however, require tuning qubit energies into resonance and have limited fidelity due to charge noise. We present a novel photon-mediated cross-resonance gate that is consistent with realistic experimental capabilities and requires no resonant tuning. Furthermore, we propose gate sequences capable of suppressing errors due to quasistatic noise for both the cross-resonance and iSWAP gates.
For superconducting qubits, microwave pulses drive rotations around the Bloch sphere. The phase of these drives can be used to generate zero-duration arbitrary virtual Z-gates which, combined with two $X_{pi/2}$ gates, can generate any SU(2) gate. Here we show how to best utilize these virtual Z-gates to both improve algorithms and correct pulse errors. We perform randomized benchmarking using a Clifford set of Hadamard and Z-gates and show that the error per Clifford is reduced versus a set consisting of standard finite-duration X and Y gates. Z-gates can correct unitary rotation errors for weakly anharmonic qubits as an alternative to pulse shaping techniques such as DRAG. We investigate leakage and show that a combination of DRAG pulse shaping to minimize leakage and Z-gates to correct rotation errors (DRAGZ) realizes a 13.3~ns $X_{pi/2}$ gate characterized by low error ($1.95[3]times 10^{-4}$) and low leakage ($3.1[6]times 10^{-6}$). Ultimately leakage is limited by the finite temperature of the qubit, but this limit is two orders-of-magnitude smaller than pulse errors due to decoherence.