No Arabic abstract
We study a tripartite system of coupled spins, where a first set of one or two spins is our central system which is coupled to another set considered, the near environment, in turn coupled to the third set, the far environment. The dynamics considered are those of a generalized kicked spin chain in the regime of quantum chaotic dynamics. This allows to test recent results that suggest that the presence of a far environment, coupled to the near environment, slows decoherence of the central system. After an extensive numerical study, we confirm previous results for extreme values and special cases. In particular, under a wide variety of circumstances an increasingly large coupling between near and far environment, slows decoherence, as measured by purity, and protects internal entanglement.
We have in mind a register of qubits for an quantum information system, and consider its decoherence in an idealized but typical situation. Spontaneous decay and other couplings to the far environment considered as the world outside the quantum apparatus will be neglected, while couplings to quantum states within the apparatus, i.e. to a near environment are assumed to dominate. Thus the central system couples to the near environment which in turn couples to a far environment. Considering that the dynamics in the near environment is not sufficiently well known or controllable, we shall use random matrix methods to obtain analytic results. We consider a simplified situation where the central system suffers weak dephasing from the near environment, which in turn is coupled randomly to the far environment. We find the anti-intuitive result that increasing the coupling between near and far environment actually protects the central qubit.
We study quantum decoherence numerically in a system consisting of a relativistic quantum field theory coupled to a measuring device that is itself coupled to an environment. The measuring device and environment are treated as quantum, non-relativistic particles. We solve the Schrodinger equation for the wave function of this tripartite system using exact diagonalization. Although computational limitations on the size of the Hilbert space prevent us from exploring the regime where the device and environment consist of a truly macroscopic number of degrees of freedom, we nevertheless see clear evidence of decoherence: after tracing out the environment, the density matrix describing the system and measuring device evolves quickly towards a matrix that is close to diagonal in a subspace of pointer states.
We present a simple and powerful technique for finding a good error model for a quantum processor. The technique iteratively tests a nested sequence of models against data obtained from the processor, and keeps track of the best-fit model and its wildcard error (a quantification of the unmodeled error) at each step. Each best-fit model, along with a quantification of its unmodeled error, constitute a characterization of the processor. We explain how quantum processor models can be compared with experimental data and to each other. We demonstrate the technique by using it to characterize a simulated noisy 2-qubit processor.
We perform several numerical studies for our recently published adaptive compressive tomography scheme [D. Ahn et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 100404 (2019)], which significantly reduces the number of measurement settings to unambiguously reconstruct any rank-deficient state without any a priori knowledge besides its dimension. We show that both entangled and product bases chosen by our adaptive scheme perform comparably well with recently-known compressed-sensing element-probing measurements, and also beat random measurement bases for low-rank quantum states. We also numerically conjecture asymptotic scaling behaviors for this number as a function of the state rank for our adaptive schemes. These scaling formulas appear to be independent of the Hilbert space dimension. As a natural development, we establish a faster hybrid compressive scheme that first chooses random bases, and later adaptive bases as the scheme progresses. As an epilogue, we reiterate important elements of informational completeness for our adaptive scheme.
We consider the quantum harmonic oscillator in contact with a finite temperature bath, modelled by the Caldeira-Leggett master equation. Applying periodic kicks to the oscillator, we study the system in different dynamical regimes between classical integrability and chaos on the one hand, and ballistic or diffusive energy absorption on the other. We then investigate the influence of the heat bath on the oscillator in each case. Phase space techniques allow us to simulate the evolution of the system efficiently. In this way, we calculate high resolution Wigner functions at long times, where the system approaches a quasi-stationary cyclic evolution. Thereby, we are able to perform an accurate study of the thermodynamic properties of a non-integrable, quantum chaotic system in contact with a heat bath.