We propose the use of non-equally spaced decoupling pulses for high-resolution selective addressing of nuclear spins by a quantum sensor. The analytical model of the basic operating principle is supplemented by detailed numerical studies that demonstrate the high degree of selectivity and the robustness against static and dynamic control field errors of this scheme. We exemplify our protocol with an NV center-based sensor to demonstrate that it enables the identification of individual nuclear spins that form part of a large spin ensemble.
The use of the nuclear spins surrounding electron spin qubits as quantum registers and long-lived memories opens the way to new applications in quantum information and biological sensing. Hence, there is a need for generic and robust forms of control
of the nuclear registers. Although adiabatic gates are widely used in quantum information, they can become too slow to outpace decoherence. Here, we introduce a technique whereby adiabatic gates arise from the dynamical decoupling protocols that simultaneously extend coherence. We illustrate this pulse-based adiabatic control for nuclear spins around NV centers in diamond. We obtain a closed-form expression from Landau-Zener theory and show that it reliably describes the dynamics. By identifying robust Floquet states, we show that the technique enables polarisation, one-shot flips and state storage for nuclear spins. These results introduce a new control paradigm that combines dynamical decoupling with adiabatic evolution.
The loss of coherence is one of the main obstacles for the implementation of quantum information processing. The efficiency of dynamical decoupling schemes, which have been introduced to address this problem, is limited itself by the fluctuations in
the driving fields which will themselves introduce noise. We address this challenge by introducing the concept of concatenated continuous dynamical decoupling, which can overcome not only external magnetic noise but also noise due to fluctuations in driving fields. We show theoretically that this approach can achieve relaxation limited coherence times, and demonstrate experimentally that already the most basic implementation of this concept yields an order of magnitude improvement of the decoherence time for the electron spin of nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond. The proposed scheme can be applied to a wide variety of other physical systems including, trapped atoms and ions, quantum dots, and may be combined with other quantum technologies challenges such as quantum sensing and quantum information processing.
Implementing precise operations on quantum systems is one of the biggest challenges for building quantum devices in a noisy environment. Dynamical decoupling (DD) attenuates the destructive effect of the environmental noise, but so far it has been us
ed primarily in the context of quantum memories. Here, we present a general scheme for combining DD with quantum logical gate operations and demonstrate its performance on the example of an electron spin qubit of a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. We achieve process fidelities >98% for gate times that are 2 orders of magnitude longer than the unprotected dephasing time $T_{2}$.
Dephasing -- phase randomization of a quantum superposition state -- is a major obstacle for the realization of high fidelity quantum logic operations. Here, we implement a two-qubit Controlled-NOT gate using dynamical decoupling (DD), despite the ga
te time being more than one order of magnitude longer than the intrinsic coherence time of the system. For realizing this universal conditional quantum gate, we have devised a concatenated DD sequence that ensures robustness against imperfections of DD pulses that otherwise may destroy quantum information or interfere with gate dynamics. We compare its performance with three other types of DD sequences. These experiments are carried out using a well-controlled prototype quantum system -- trapped atomic ions coupled by an effective spin-spin interaction. The scheme for protecting conditional quantum gates demonstrated here is applicable to other physical systems, such as nitrogen vacancy centers, solid state nuclear magnetic resonance, and circuit quantum electrodynamics.
Dynamical decoupling (DD) is a powerful method for controlling arbitrary open quantum systems. In quantum spin control, DD generally involves a sequence of timed spin flips ($pi$ rotations) arranged to average out or selectively enhance coupling to t
he environment. Experimentally, errors in the spin flips are inevitably introduced, motivating efforts to optimise error-robust DD. Here we invert this paradigm: by introducing particular control errors in standard DD, namely a small constant deviation from perfect $pi$ rotations (pulse adjustments), we show we obtain protocols that retain the advantages of DD while introducing the capabilities of quantum state readout and polarisation transfer. We exploit this nuclear quantum state selectivity on an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond to efficiently polarise the $^{13}$C quantum bath. The underlying physical mechanism is generic and paves the way to systematic engineering of pulse-adjusted protocols with nuclear state selectivity for quantum control applications.