No Arabic abstract
To solve classically hard problems, quantum computers need to be resilient to the influence of noise and decoherence. In such a fault-tolerant quantum computer, noise-induced errors must be detected and corrected in real-time to prevent them from propagating between components. This requirement is especially pertinent while applying quantum gates, when the interaction between components can cause errors to quickly spread throughout the system. However, the large overhead involved in most fault-tolerant architectures makes implementing these systems a daunting task, which motivates the search for hardware-efficient alternatives. Here, we present a gate enacted by a multilevel ancilla transmon on a cavity-encoded logical qubit that is fault-tolerant with respect to decoherence in both the ancilla and the encoded qubit. We maintain the purity of the encoded qubit in the presence of ancilla errors by detecting those errors in real-time, and applying the appropriate corrections. We show a reduction of the logical gate error by a factor of two in the presence of naturally occurring decoherence, and demonstrate resilience against ancilla bit-flips and phase-flips by observing a sixfold suppression of the gate error with increased energy relaxation, and a fourfold suppression with increased dephasing noise. The results demonstrate that bosonic logical qubits can be controlled by error-prone ancilla qubits without inheriting the ancillas inferior performance. As such, error-corrected ancilla-enabled gates are an important step towards fully fault-tolerant processing of bosonic qubits.
The Eastin-Knill theorem states that no quantum error correcting code can have a universal set of transversal gates. For self-dual CSS codes that can implement Clifford gates transversally it suffices to provide one additional non-Clifford gate, such as the $T$-gate, to achieve universality. Common methods to implement fault-tolerant $T$-gates like magic state distillation generate a significant hardware overhead that will likely prevent their practical usage in the near-term future. Recently methods have been developed to mitigate the effect of noise in shallow quantum circuits that are not protected by error correction. Error mitigation methods require no additional hardware resources but suffer from a bad asymptotic scaling and apply only to a restricted class of quantum algorithms. In this work, we combine both approaches and show how to implement encoded Clifford+$T$ circuits where Clifford gates are protected from noise by error correction while errors introduced by noisy encoded $T$-gates are mitigated using the quasi-probability method. As a result, Clifford+$T$ circuits with a number of $T$-gates inversely proportional to the physical noise rate can be implemented on small error-corrected devices without magic state distillation. We argue that such circuits can be out of reach for state-of-the-art classical simulation algorithms.
Quantum computation requires qubits that satisfy often-conflicting criteria, including scalable control and long-lasting coherence. One approach to creating a suitable qubit is to operate in an encoded subspace of several physical qubits. Though such encoded qubits may be particularly susceptible to leakage out of their computational subspace, they can be insensitive to certain noise processes and can also allow logical control with a single type of entangling interaction while maintaining favorable features of the underlying physical system. Here we demonstrate a qubit encoded in a subsystem of three coupled electron spins confined in gated, isotopically enhanced silicon quantum dots. Using a modified blind randomized benchmarking protocol that determines both computational and leakage errors, we show that unitary operations have an average total error of 0.35%, with 0.17% of that coming from leakage driven by interactions with substrate nuclear spins. This demonstration utilizes only the voltage-controlled exchange interaction for qubit manipulation and highlights the operational benefits of encoded subsystems, heralding the realization of high-quality encoded multi-qubit operations.
We demonstrate a simple pulse shaping technique designed to improve the fidelity of spin-dependent force operations commonly used to implement entangling gates in trapped-ion systems. This extension of the M{o}lmer-S{o}rensen gate can theoretically suppress the effects of certain frequency and timing errors to any desired order and is demonstrated through Walsh modulation of a two-qubit entangling gate on trapped atomic ions. The technique is applicable to any system of qubits coupled through collective harmonic oscillator modes.
Coherent operations constitutive for the implementation of single and multi-qubit quantum gates with trapped ions are demonstrated that are robust against variations in experimental parameters and intrinsically indeterministic system parameters. In particular, pulses developed using optimal control theory are demonstrated for the first time with trapped ions. Their performance as a function of error parameters is systematically investigated and compared to composite pulses.
In the current era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology, the practical use of quantum computers remains inhibited by our inability to aptly decouple qubits from their environment to mitigate computational errors. In this work, we introduce an approach by which knowledge of a qubits initial quantum state and the standard parameters describing its decoherence can be leveraged to mitigate the noise present during the execution of a single-qubit gate. We benchmark our protocol using cloud-based access to IBM quantum processors. On ibmq_rome, we demonstrate a reduction of the single-qubit error rate by $38%$, from $1.6 times 10 ^{-3}$ to $1.0 times 10 ^{-3}$, provided the initial state of the input qubit is known. On ibmq_bogota, we prove that our protocol will never decrease gate fidelity, provided the systems $T_1$ and $T_2$ times have not drifted above $100$ times their assumed values. The protocol can be used to reduce quantum state preparation errors, as well as to improve the fidelity of quantum circuits for which some knowledge of the qubits intermediate states can be inferred. This work presents a pathway to using information about noise levels and quantum state distributions to significantly reduce error rates associated with quantum gates via optimized decomposition into native gates.