We address the characterization of qubit chains and assess the performances of local measurements compared to those provided by Feynman probes, i.e. nonlocal measurements realized by coupling a single qubit regis- ter to the chain. We show that local measurements are suitable to estimate small values of the coupling and that a Bayesian strategy may be successfully exploited to achieve optimal precision. For larger values of the coupling Bayesian local strategies do not lead to a consistent estimate. In this regime, Feynman probes may be exploited to build a consistent Bayesian estimator that saturates the Cramér-Rao bound, thus providing an effective characterization of the chain. Finally, we show that ultimate bounds to precision, i.e. saturation of the quantum Cramér-Rao bound, may be achieved by a two-step scheme employing Feynman probes followed by local measurements.
The operation of a quantum computer is considered as a general quantum operation on a mixed state on many qubits followed by a measurement. The general quantum operation is further represented as a Feynman-Vernon double path integral over the histories of the qubits and of an environment, and afterward tracing out the environment. The qubit histories are taken to be paths on the two-sphere $S^2$ as in Klauder's coherent-state path integralof spin, and the environment is assumed to consist of harmonic oscillators initially in thermal equilibrium, and linearly coupled to to qubit operators $\hat…
Towards quantum computing Feynman diagrams in hybrid qubit-oscillator devices
Instituto de Física Teorica, UAM-CSIC, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学理论物理研究所）；Department of Physics, University of Oxford（牛津大学物理系）；Department of Physics, Swansea University（斯旺西大学物理系）
We study the protective measurement of a qubit by a second qubit acting as a probe. Consideration of this model is motivated by the possibility of its experimental implementation in multiqubit systems such as trapped ions. In our scheme, information about the expectation value of an arbitrary observable of the system qubit is encoded in the rotation of the state of the probe qubit. We describe the structure of the Hamiltonian that gives rise to this measurement and analyze the resulting dynamics under a variety of realistic conditions, such as noninfinitesimal measurement strengths, repeated m…
We present a collection of results about the clock in Feynman's computer construction and Kitaev's Local Hamiltonian problem. First, by analyzing the spectra of quantum walks on a line with varying endpoint terms, we find a better lower bound on the gap of the Feynman Hamiltonian, which translates into a less strict promise gap requirement for the QMA-complete Local Hamiltonian problem. We also translate this result into the language of adiabatic quantum computation. Second, introducing an idling clock construction with a large state space but fast Cesaro mixing, we provide a way for achieving…
We study the back action on a coupled multiple-qubit system induced by a quantum cavity probe in a non-demolition quantum measurement scheme. The exact quantum state stochastic Schrödinger equation is derived to systematically investigate the dynamics of quantum entanglement of the multiple-qubit system inside the cavity probe. Although quantum entanglement cannot be directly measured through experiments, the back action on quantum entanglement in the multi-qubit system is witnessed by applying the exact quantum state stochastic equations. Our results demonstrate that the analysis on the sensi…
We investigate the dynamics for a two level atomic system entangled to coherent states using the recently developed mode invisibility technique. Using a quantum 2-level probe, we demonstrate a way to non-destructively measure a number of properties between a qubit entangled with a generalized CAT state, including the amplitude of the coherent state, the location and relative excitation of the qubit, and the von Neumann entropy. Our results indicate a connection between this last quantity and the interferometric phase shift of the probe, thereby suggesting a possible way to experimentally measu…
We propose a method to measure the quantum state of a single mode of the electromagnetic field. The method is based on the interaction of the field with a probe qubit. The qubit polarizations along coordinate axes are functions of the interaction time and from their Fourier transform we can in general fully reconstruct pure states of the field and obtain partial information in the case of mixed states. The method is illustrated by several examples, including the superposition of Fock states, coherent states, and exotic states generated by the dynamical Casimir effect.
Generation and read-out of many-body Bell correlations with a probe qubit
Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech（奇力马扎罗量子技术）；ICFO-Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（ICFO-光子科学研究所，巴塞罗那科学技术研究院）；Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw（华沙大学物理学院）
Thermal microwave states are omnipresent noise sources in superconducting quantum circuits covering all relevant frequency regimes. We use them as a probe to identify three second-order decoherence mechanisms of a superconducting transmon. First, we quantify the efficiency of a resonator filter in the dispersive Jaynes-Cummings regime and find evidence for parasitic loss channels. Second, we probe second-order noise in the low-frequency regime and demonstrate the expected $T^{3}$ temperature dependence of the qubit dephasing rate. Finally, we show that qubit parameter fluctuations due to two-l…
Superconducting qubit as a probe of quantum fluctuations in a nonlinear resonator
除了它们在量子信息处理中的核心作用之外，量子比特已经被证明是一系列其他应用中的有用工具，例如增强的量子传感和量子噪声的光谱仪。在这里，我们表明，超导量子比特强耦合到一个非线性谐振器可以作为探测器的量子涨落的谐振器内的字段。基于以前的工作[M]。Boissoneault等人，Phys.Rev.A85，022305（2012）]，我们导出了考虑到谐振器场的压缩的量子位的有效主方程。我们展示了如何在量子比特的激发光谱，由这个模型预测的边带可以揭示压缩和量子加热的信息。本文的主要结果已成功地与实验数据进行了比较[F. R. Ong等人，Phys.Rev.Lett. 110，047001（2013）]，并且我们在此呈现推导的细节。
The interaction of a quantum system, which is not accessible by direct measurement, with an external probe can be exploited to infer specific features of the system itself. We introduce a probing scheme based on the emergence of spontaneous quantum synchronization between an out-of-equilibrium qubit, in contact with an external environment, and a probe qubit. Tuning the frequency of the probe leads to a transition between synchronization in phase and antiphase. The sharp transition between these two regimes is locally accessible by monitoring the probe dynamics alone and allows one to reconstr…
Quantum probing consists of suitably exploiting a simple, small, and controllable quantum system to characterize a larger and more complex system. Here, we address the estimation of the cutoff frequency of the Ohmic spectral density of a harmonic reservoir by quantum probes. To this aim, we address the use of single-qubit and two-qubit systems and different kinds of coupling with the bath of oscillators. We assess the estimation precision by the quantum Fisher information of the sole quantum probe as well as the corresponding quantum signal-to-noise ratio. We prove that, for most of the values…
We address a particular instance where open quantum systems may be used as quantum probes for an emergent property of a complex system, as the temperature of a thermal bath. The inherent fragility of the quantum probes against decoherence is the key feature making the overall scheme very sensitive. The specific setting examined here is that of quantum thermometry, which aims to exploits decoherence as resource to estimate the temperature of a sample. We focus on temperature estimation for a bosonic bath at equilibrium in the Ohmic regime (ranging from sub-Ohmic to super- Ohmic), by using pairs…
Complex mesoscopic systems play increasingly important roles in modern science -- from understanding biological functions at the molecular level, to designing solid-state information processing devices. The operation of these systems typically depends on their energetic structure, yet probing their energy-landscape can be extremely challenging; they have many degrees of freedom, which may be hard to isolate and measure independently. Here we show that a qubit (a two-level quantum system) with a biased energy-splitting can directly probe the spectral properties of a complex system, without know…
Quantum resources, such as entanglement, can decrease the uncertainty of a parameter-estimation procedure beyond what is classically possible. This phenomenon is well described for noiseless systems with asymptotically many measurement resources by the Quantum Cramer-Rao Bound, but no general description exists for the regime of limited measurement resources. We address this problem by defining a Bayesian quantifier for uncertainty suitable for the regime of limited resources, and by developing a mathematical description for a parameter-estimation procedure which uses qubit probes to estimate …
In projective measurements of energy, a target system is projected to an eigenstate of the system Hamiltonian, and the measurement outcomes provide the information of corresponding eigen-energies. Recently, it has been shown that such a measurement can be in principle realized without detailed knowledge of the Hamiltonian by using probe qubits. However, in the previous approach for the energy measurement, the necessary size of the dimension for the probe increases as we increase the dimension of the target system, and also individual addresibility of every qubit is required, which may not be p…
We investigate the possibility to monitor the dynamics of an open quantum system with the help of a small probe system, coupled via dephasing coupling to the open system of interest. As an example, we consider a dissipative harmonic oscillator and a single qubit as probe system. Qubit plus oscillator are described by a finite temperature quantum master equation, where the dynamics of the whole system can be obtained analytically. We find that the short time behavior of the reduced qubit state (its coherence) provides exhaustive information on the dissipative dynamics of the oscillator. Observi…
Non-destructive detection of photonic qubits will enable important applications in photonic quantum information processing and quantum communications. Here, we present an approach based on a solid-state cavity containing an ensemble of rare-earth ions. First a probe pulse containing many photons is stored in the ensemble. Then a single signal photon, which represents a time-bin qubit, imprints a phase on the ensemble that is due to the AC Stark effect. This phase does not depend on the exact timing of the signal photon, which makes the detection insensitive to the time-bin qubit state. Then th…
Amplification of optical or microwave fields is often achieved by strongly driving a medium to induce population inversion such that a weak probe can be amplified through stimulated emission. Here we strongly couple a superconducting qubit, an artificial atom, to the field in a semi-infinite waveguide. When driving the qubit strongly on resonance such that a Mollow triplet appears, we observe a 7\% amplitude gain for a weak probe at frequencies in-between the triplet. This amplification is not due to population inversion, neither in the bare qubit basis nor in the dressed-state basis, but inst…
Careful tailoring the quantum state of probes offers the capability of investigating matter at unprecedented precisions. Rarely, however, the interaction with the sample is fully encompassed by a single parameter, and the information contained in the probe needs to be partitioned on multiple parameters. There exist then practical bounds on the ultimate joint-estimation precision set by the unavailability of a single optimal measurement for all parameters. Here we discuss how these considerations are modified for two-level quantum probes - qubits - by the use of two copies and entangling measur…
We address the discrimination of structured baths at different temperatures by dephasing quantum probes. We derive the exact reduced dynamics and evaluate the minimum error probability achievable by three different kinds of quantum probes, namely a qubit, a qutrit and a quantum register made of two qubits. Our results indicate that dephasing quantum probes are useful in discriminating low values of temperature, and that lower probabilities of error are achieved for intermediate values of the interaction time. A qutrit probe outperforms a qubit one in the discrimination task, whereas a register…
A nanomagnet precessing in an external magnetic field can be treated as a source of narrow-bandwidth magnetic noise, that leaves characteristic fingerprints in decoherence of a nearby spin qubit undergoing dynamical decoupling. We show how, by measurements of two-qubit coherence, a noise sensor composed of qubit pair can be used to reconstruct the position of the nanomagnet. Such localization of noise source is possible with only two qubit probes, because the course of coherence decay under appropriately designed dynamical decoupling sequences contain information not only about noises experien…
We propose a variational quantum algorithm to study the real time dynamics of quantum systems as a ground-state problem. The method is based on the original proposal of Feynman and Kitaev to encode time into a register of auxiliary qubits. We prepare the Feynman-Kitaev Hamiltonian acting on the composed system as a qubit operator and find an approximate ground state using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver. We apply the algorithm to the study of the dynamics of a transverse field Ising chain with an increasing number of spins and time steps, proving a favorable scaling in terms of the number …
Different hypotheses about a quantum system such as the logical state of a qubit or the value of physical interaction parameters can be investigated by the interaction with a probe field. Such fields may be prepared in particularly sensitive quantum states, and we can use quantum trajectories to model the stochastic measurement record and conditional evolution of the state of the quantum system subject to its interaction with a travelling pulse of radiation. Our analysis applies to different measurement strategies and to arbitrary input quantum states of the probe field pulse and it thus permi…
Standard thermometry employs the thermalisation of a probe with the system of interest. This approach can be extended by incorporating the possibility of using the non-equilibrium states of the probe, and the presence of coherence. Here, we illustrate how these concepts apply to the single-qubit thermometer introduced by Jevtic et al. by performing a simulation of the qubit-environment interaction in a linear-optical device. We discuss the role of the coherence, and how this affects the usefulness of non-equilibrium conditions. The origin of the observed behaviour is traced back to the propens…
We introduce a three qubit waveguide QED system to mimic the cavity-QED strong coupling regime of a probe qubit embedded in atom-like mirrors, which was realized in recent experiments. We then extend this system into the deep non-Markovian regime and demonstrate the profound role that retardation plays on the dressed resonances, allowing one to significantly improve the polariton lifetimes (by many orders of magnitude), tune the resonances, as well as realize Fano-like resonances and simultaneous coupling to multiple cavity modes. Exact Green function solutions are presented for the spectral r…
We propose a novel approach to qubit thermometry using a quantum switch, that introduces an indefinite causal order in the probe-bath interaction, to significantly enhance the thermometric precision. The resulting qubit probe shows improved precision in both low and high temperature regimes when compared to optimal qubit probes studied previously. It even performs better than a Harmonic oscillator probe, in spite of having only two energy levels rather than an infinite number of energy levels as that in a harmonic oscillator. We thereby show unambiguously that quantum resources such as the qua…
We consider frequency estimation in a noisy environment with noisy probes. This builds on previous studies, most of which assume that the initial probe state is pure, while the encoding process is noisy, or that the initial probe state is mixed, while the encoding process is noiseless. Our work is more representative of reality, where noise is unavoidable in both the initial state of the probe and the estimation process itself. We prepare the probe in a GHZ diagonal state, starting from $n+1$ qubits in an arbitrary uncorrelated mixed state, and subject it to parameter encoding under dephasing …
Estimating the dimension of an Hilbert space is an important component of quantum system identification. In quantum technologies, the dimension of a quantum system (or its corresponding accessible Hilbert space) is an important resource, as larger dimensions determine e.g. the performance of quantum computation protocols or the sensitivity of quantum sensors. Despite being a critical task in quantum system identification, estimating the Hilbert space dimension is experimentally challenging. While there have been proposals for various dimension witnesses capable of putting a lower bound on the …
