Most quantum processors requires pulse sequences for controlling quantum states. Here, we present an alternative algorithm for computing an optimal pulse sequence in order to perform a specific task, being an implementation of a quantum gate or a quantum state preparation. In our method, we reduced drastically the number of parameters to be fitted, by using a limited number of functions as the modulations for the amplitude and phase of the radio-frequency pulses, and employed approximations to make the algorithm fast and scalable. We demonstrate the success of the proposed algorithm, by performing several real experiments for 4, 7 and 12 quantum bits systems using NMR. In addition, we have also shown the efficiency of the algorithm, finding pulses for controlling with good fidelity the quantum states of spins in a fictional square bi-dimensional lattices containing 16, 36 and 100 qubits.
We show that the addition of correlated phases to the recently developed method of randomized dynamical decoupling pulse sequences [Physical Review Letters 122, 200403 (2019)] can improve its performance in quantum sensing. In particular, by correlating the relative phases of basic pulse units in dynamical decoupling sequences, we are able to improve the suppression of the signal distortion due to $π$ pulse imperfections and spurious responses due to finite-width $π$ pulses. This enhances selectivity of quantum sensors such as those based on NV centers in diamond.
We present a new method for determining pulse imperfections and improving the single-gate fidelity in a superconducting qubit. By applying consecutive positive and negative $π$ pulses, we amplify the qubit evolution due to microwave pulse distortion, which causes the qubit state to rotate around an axis perpendicular to the intended rotation axis. Measuring these rotations as a function of pulse period allows us to reconstruct the shape of the microwave pulse arriving at the sample. Using the extracted response to predistort the input signal, we are able to improve the pulse shapes and to reac…
Current implementations of superconducting qubits are often limited by the low fidelities of multi-qubit gates. We present a reproducible and runtime-efficient pulse-level approach for calibrating an improved cross-resonance gate CR($θ$) for arbitrary $θ$. This CR($θ$) gate can be used to produce a wide range of other two-qubit gates via the application of standard single-qubit gates. By performing an interleaved randomised benchmarking experiment, we demonstrate that our approach leads to a significantly higher noise resistance than the circuit-level approach currently used by IBM. Hence, our…
We present highly robust, optimal control-based shaped pulses designed to replace all 90° and 180° hard pulses in a given pulse sequence for improved performance. Special attention was devoted to ensuring that the pulses can be simply substituted in a one-to-one fashion for the original hard pulses without any additional modification of the existing sequence. The set of four pulses for each nucleus therefore consists of 90° and 180° point-to-point (PP) and universal rotation (UR) pulses of identical duration. These 1 ms pulses provide uniform performance over resonance offsets of 20 kHz (1H) a…
This work investigates the utility of femtosecond pulse shaping in increasing the efficiency of Raman excitation of molecules in the strong-field interaction regime. We study experimentally and theoretically the effect of pulse shaping on the strength of non-resonant coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering in iodine vapor at laser intensities exceeding $10^{13}$ W/cm$^2$. We show that unlike the perturbative case, shaping strong non-resonant laser pulses can increase the signal strength beyond that observed with the transform-limited excitation. Both adiabatic and non-adiabatic schemes of excita…
We study cooling performance of a realistic mechanical resonator containing defects. The normal cooling method through an optomechanical system does not work efficiently due to those defects. We show by employing periodical $σ_z$ pulses, we can eliminate the interaction between defects and their surrounded heat baths up to the first order of time. Compared with the cooling performance of no $σ_z$ pulses case, much better cooling results are obtained. Moreover, this pulse sequence has an ability to improve the cooling performance of the resonator with different defects energy gaps and different…
Many techniques in quantum control rely on frequency separation as a means for suppressing unwanted couplings. In its simplest form, the mechanism relies on the low bandwidth of control pulses of long duration. Here we perform a higher-order quantum-mechanical treatment that allows for higher precision and shorter times. In particular, we identify three kinds of off-resonant effects: i) simultaneous unwanted driven couplings (e.g. due to drive crosstalk), ii) additional (initially undriven) transitions such as those in an infinite ladder system, and iii) sideband frequencies of the driving wav…
Present schemes involving the quantum non-demolition interaction between atomic samples and off-resonant light pulses allow us to store quantum information corresponding to a single harmonic oscillator (mode) in one multiatomic system. We discuss the possibility to involve several coherences of each atom so that the atomic sample can store information contained in several quantum modes. This is achieved by the coupling of different magnetic sublevels of the relevant hyperfine level by additional Raman pulses. This technique allows us to design not only the quantum non-demolition coupling, but …
Improving Single Excitation Fidelity in Rydberg Superatoms for Efficient Single Photon Emission
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH（于利希研究中心）；Peter Grünberg Institute, Quantum Control (PGI-8)（彼得·格林伯格研究所量子控制部门）；University of Cologne（科隆大学）；OIST Graduate University（冲绳科学技术大学院大学）；Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Collège de France（法兰西学院）；PSL University（巴黎文理研究大学）
We study theoretically and experimentally the influence of temporally shaping the light pulses in an atom interferometer, with a focus on the phase response of the interferometer. We show that smooth light pulse shapes allow rejecting high frequency phase fluctuations (above the Rabi frequency) and thus relax the requirements on the phase noise or frequency noise of the interrogation lasers driving the interferometer. The light pulse shape is also shown to modify the scale factor of the interferometer, which has to be taken into account in the evaluation of its accuracy budget. We discuss the …
Enhancing quantum entanglement is important for many quantum information processing applications. In this paper, we consider a protocol for entanglement enhancing in a two-mode squeezed vacuum state (TMSVS), attained based on photon subtraction, photon catalysis, and photon addition. Central to such an operation is the task of mixing and detecting number states with each mode of TMSVS. We analyze various settings and find an optimal setup for improving the entanglement of the state.
Coherent optical information storage capacity of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate is examined. Theory of slow light propagation in atomic clouds is generalized to short pulse regime by taking into account group velocity dispersion. It is shown that the number of stored pulses in the condensate can be optimized for a particular coupling laser power, temperature and interatomic interaction strength. Analytical results are derived for semi-ideal model of the condensate using effective uniform density zone approximation. Detailed numerical simulations are also performed. It is found that axial d…
We investigate the application of amplitude-shaped control pulses for enhancing the time and frequency resolution of multipulse quantum sensing sequences. Using the electronic spin of a single nitrogen vacancy center in diamond and up to 10,000 coherent microwave pulses with a cosine square envelope, we demonstrate 0.6 ps timing resolution for the interpulse delay. This represents a refinement by over 3 orders of magnitude compared to the 2 ns hardware sampling. We apply the method for the detection of external AC magnetic fields and nuclear magnetic resonance signals of carbon-13 spins with h…
Quantum key distribution establishes a secret string of bits between two distant parties. Of concern in weak laser pulse schemes is the especially strong photon number splitting attack by an eavesdropper, but the decoy state method can detect this attack with current technology, yielding a high rate of secret bits. In this Letter, we develop rigorous security statements in the case of finite statistics with only a few decoy states, and we present the results of simulations of an experimental setup of a decoy state protocol that can be simply realized with current technology.
We describe a pump-probe scheme with which the spatial asymmetry of dissociating molecular fragments --- as controlled by the carrier-envelope phase of an intense few-cycle laser pulse --- can be enhanced by an order of magnitude or more. We illustrate the scheme using extensive, full-dimensional calculations for dissociation of H$_2^+$ and include the averaging necessary for comparison with experiment.
Strong ultrashort laser pulses give rise to prompt molecular alignment followed by full, half and quarter quantum revivals of the rotational wave packets. In Four Wave Mixing (FWM) experiments, we make use of the long succession of repetitive alignment revivals to demonstrate isotope-selective alignment and time-resolved discrimination between different isotopic species. For two isotopes with a commensurate ratio of their moments of inertia, we observe constructive and destructive interferences of the FWM signals originating from different isotopes. Such destructive interference serves as an i…
Full control over the spatio-temporal structure of quantum states of light is an important goal in quantum optics, to generate for instance single-mode quantum pulses or to encode information on multiple modes, enhancing channel capacities. Quantum light pulses feature an inherent, rich spectral broadband-mode structure. In recent years, exploring the use of integrated optics as well as source-engineering has led to a deep understanding of the pulse-mode structure of guided quantum states of light. In addition, several groups have started to investigate the manipulation of quantum states by me…
Improving coherence times of quantum bits is a fundamental challenge in the field of quantum computing. With long-lived qubits it becomes, however, inefficient to wait until the qubits have relaxed to their ground state after completion of an experiment. Moreover, for error-correction schemes it is import to rapidly re-initialize ancilla parity-check qubits. We present a simple pulsed qubit reset protocol based on a two-pulse sequence. A first pulse transfers the excited state population to a higher excited qubit state and a second pulse into a lossy environment provided by a low-Q transmissio…
Recently proposed quantum-chaotic sensors achieve quantum enhancements in measurement precision by applying nonlinear control pulses to the dynamics of the quantum sensor while using classical initial states that are easy to prepare. Here, we use the cross-entropy method of reinforcement learning to optimize the strength and position of control pulses. Compared to the quantum-chaotic sensors with periodic control pulses in the presence of superradiant damping, we find that decoherence can be fought even better and measurement precision can be enhanced further by optimizing the control. In some…
We explore an intriguing alternative for a fast and high-fidelity generation of steady-state entanglement. By exponentially enhancing the atom-cavity interaction, we obtain an exponentially-enhanced effective cooperativity of the system, which results in a high fidelity of the state generation. Meanwhile, we modulate the amplitudes of the driving fields to accelerate the population transfer to a target state, e.g., a Bell state. An exponentially-shortened stabilization time is thus predicted. Specifically, when the cooperativity of the system is $C=30$, the fidelity of the acceleration scheme …
We propose an enhanced optical interferometer based on tailored non-classical light generated by nonlinear dynamics and projective measurements in a three-level atom cavity QED system. A coherent state in the cavity becomes dynamically entangled with two ground states of the atom and is transformed to a macroscopic superposition state via a projective measurement on the atom. We show that the resulting highly non-classical state can improve interferometric precision measurements well beyond the shot-noise limit once combined with a classical laser pulse at the input of a Mach-Zehnder interfero…
We present robust radio frequency (rf) pulses that tolerate a factor of six inhomogeneity in the B1 field, significantly enhancing the potential of toroid cavity resonators for NMR spectroscopic applications. Both point-to-point (PP) and unitary rotation (UR) pulses were optimized for excitation, inversion, and refocusing using the gradient ascent pulse engineering (GRAPE) algorithm based on optimal control theory. In addition, the optimized parameterization (OP) algorithm applied to the adiabatic BIR-4 UR pulse scheme enabled ultra-short (50 microsec) pulses with acceptable performance compar…
Silicon quantum dot qubits must contend with low-lying valley excited states which are sensitive functions of the quantum well heterostructure and disorder; quantifying and maximizing the energies of these states are critical to improving device performance. We describe a spectroscopic method for probing excited states in isolated Si/SiGe double quantum dots using standard baseband pulsing techniques, easing the extraction of energy spectra in multiple-dot devices. We use this method to measure dozens of valley excited state energies spanning multiple wafers, quantum dots, and orbital states, …
A device being a pinnacle of development of an optical quantum memory should combine the capabilities of storage, inter-communication and processing of stored information. In particular, the ability to capture a train of optical pulses, interfere them in an arbitrary way and finally perform on-demand release would in a loose sense realize an optical analogue of a Turing Machine. Here we demonstrate the operation of an optical quantum memory being able to store optical pulses in the form of collective spin-wave excitations in a multi-dimensional wavevector space. During storage, we perform comp…
We demonstrate that tailored laser beams provide a powerful means to make quantum vacuum signatures in strong electromagnetic fields accessible in experiment. Typical scenarios aiming at the detection of quantum vacuum nonlinearities at the high-intensity frontier envision the collision of focused laser pulses. The effective interaction of the driving fields mediated by vacuum fluctuations gives rise to signal photons encoding the signature of quantum vacuum nonlinearity. Isolating a small number of signal photons from the large background of the driving laser photons poses a major experimenta…
