A typical goal of a quantum simulation is to find the energy levels and eigenstates of a given Hamiltonian. This can be realized by adiabatically varying the system control parameters to steer an initial eigenstate into the eigenstate of the target Hamiltonian. Such an adiabatic quantum simulation is demonstrated by directly implementing a controllable and smoothly varying Hamiltonian in the rotating frame of two superconducting qubits, including longitudinal and transverse fields and iSWAP-type two-qubit interactions. The evolution of each eigenstate is tracked using time-resolved state tomography. The energy gaps between instantaneous eigenstates are chosen such that depending on the energy transition rate either diabatic or adiabatic passages are observed in the measured energies and correlators. Errors in the obtained energy values induced by finite $T_1$ and $T_2$ times of the qubits are mitigated by extrapolation to short protocol times.
We present generalized adiabatic theorems for closed and open quantum systems that can be applied to slow modulations of rapidly varying fields, such as oscillatory fields that occur in optical experiments and light induced processes. The generalized adiabatic theorems show that a sufficiently slow modulation conserves the dynamical modes of time dependent reference Hamiltonians. In the limiting case of modulations of static fields, the standard adiabatic theorems are recovered. Applying these results to periodic fields shows that they remain in Floquet states rather than in energy eigenstates. More generally, these adiabatic theorems can be applied to transformations of arbitrary time-dependent fields, by accounting for the rapidly varying part of the field through the dynamical normal modes, and treating the slow modulation adiabatically. As examples, we apply the generalized theorem to (a) predict the dynamics of a two level system driven by a frequency modulated resonant oscillation, a pathological situation beyond the applicability of earlier results, and (b) to show that open quantum systems driven by slowly turned-on incoherent light, such as biomolecules under natural illumination conditions, can only display coherences that survive in the steady state.
We propose a quantum simulator based on driven superconducting qubits where the interactions are generated parametrically by a polychromatic magnetic flux modulation of a tunable bus element. Using a time-dependent Schrieffer-Wolff transformation, we analytically derive a multi-qubit Hamiltonian which features independently tunable $XX$ and $YY$-type interactions as well as local bias fields over a large parameter range. We demonstrate the adiabatic simulation of the ground state of a hydrogen molecule using two superconducting qubits and one tunable bus element. The time required to reach chemical accuracy lies in the few microsecond range and therefore could be implemented on currently available superconducting circuits. Further applications of this technique may also be found in the simulation of interacting spin systems.
Gate-based quantum computers can in principle simulate the adiabatic dynamics of a large class of Hamiltonians. Here we consider the cyclic adiabatic evolution of a parameter in the Hamiltonian. We propose a quantum algorithm to estimate the Berry phase and use it to classify the topological order of both single-particle and interacting models, highlighting the differences between the two. This algorithm is immediately extensible to any interacting topological system. Our results evidence the potential of near-term quantum hardware for the topological classification of quantum matter.
The controls enacting logical operations on quantum systems are described by time-dependent Hamiltonians that often include rapid oscillations. In order to accurately capture the resulting time dynamics in numerical simulations, a very small integration time step is required, which can severely impact the simulation run-time. Here, we introduce a semi-analytic method based on the Dyson expansion that allows us to time-evolve driven quantum systems much faster than standard numerical integrators. This solver, which we name Dysolve, efficiently captures the effect of the highly oscillatory terms in the system Hamiltonian, significantly reducing the simulations run time as well as its sensitivity to the time-step size. Furthermore, this solver provides the exact derivative of the time-evolution operator with respect to the drive amplitudes. This key feature allows for optimal control in the limit of strong drives and goes beyond common pulse-optimization approaches that rely on rotating-wave approximations. As an illustration of our method, we show results of the optimization of a two-qubit gate using transmon qubits in the circuit QED architecture.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is an essential tool for characterizing an unknown quantum state. Recently, QST has been performed for entangled qudits based on orbital angular momentum, time-energy uncertainty, and frequency bins. Here, we propose a QST for time-bin qudits, with which the number of measurement settings scales linearly with dimension $d$. Using the proposed scheme, we performed QST for a four-dimensional time-bin maximally entangled state with 16 measurement settings. We successfully reconstructed the density matrix of the entangled qudits, with which the average fidelity of the state was calculated to be 0.950.