To build a universal quantum computer from fragile physical qubits, effective implementation of quantum error correction (QEC) is an essential requirement and a central challenge. Existing demonstrations of QEC are based on a schedule of discrete error syndrome measurements and adaptive recovery operations. These active routines are hardware intensive, prone to introducing and propagating errors, and expected to consume a vast majority of the processing power in a large-scale quantum computer. In principle, QEC can be realized autonomously and continuously by tailoring dissipation within the quantum system, but this strategy has remained challenging so far. Here we encode a logical qubit in Schrödinger cat-like multiphoton states of a superconducting cavity, and demonstrate a corrective dissipation process that directly stabilizes an error syndrome operator: the photon number parity. Implemented with continuous-wave control fields only, this passive protocol realizes autonomous correction against single-photon loss and boosts the coherence time of the multiphoton qubit by over a factor of two. Notably, QEC is realized in a modest hardware setup with neither high-fidelity readout nor fast digital feedback, in contrast to the technological sophistication required for prior QEC demonstrations. Compatible with other error suppression and phase stabilization techniques, our experiment suggests reservoir engineering as a resource-efficient alternative or supplement to active QEC in future quantum computing architectures.
High-quality-factor 3D cavities in superconducting circuits are ideal candidates for bosonic logical qubits as their fidelity is limited only by the low photon loss rate. However, the transmon qubits that are used to manipulate bosonic qubits result in the emergence of additional relaxation and dephasing channels. In this work, a numerical study is performed to elucidate the effect of the various loss channels on the performance of logical gates on a bosonic qubit. A gate error model is developed that encapsulates the loss mechanisms for arbitrary gate operations and predicts experimentally ac…
We study the entanglement of a pair of qubits resulting from their interaction with a bosonic system. Here we restrict our discussion to the case where the set of operators acting on different qubits commute. A special class of interactions inducing entanglement in an initially separable two qubit system is discussed. Our results apply to the case where the initial state of the bosonic system is represented by a statistical mixture of states with fixed particle number.
We consider a system of two iso-spectral bosonic modes coupled with a single two-level systems i.e., a qubit. The dynamics is described by a mode-symmetric two-modes Jaynes-Cummings. The entanglement, induced between the two bosonic modes, is analyzed and quantified by negativity. We computed the time evolution of negativity starting from an initial thermal state of the bosonic sector for both zero and finite temperature. We also studied the entangling power of the interaction as a function of mode-qubit detuning and its resilience against temperature increase. Finally a two-qubit gates based …
The dynamics of two interacting spins coupled to separate bosonic baths is studied. An analytical solution in Born approximation for arbitrary spectral density functions of the bosonic environments is found. It is shown that in the non-Markovian cases concurrence "lives" longer or reaches greater values.
Logical qubit encoding and quantum error correction (QEC) have been experimentally demonstrated in various physical systems with multiple physical qubits, however, logical operations are challenging due to the necessary nonlocal operations. Alternatively, logical qubits with bosonic-mode-encoding are of particular interest because their QEC protection is hardware efficient, but gate operations on QEC protected logical qubits remain elusive. Here, we experimentally demonstrate full control on a single logical qubit with a binomial bosonic code, including encoding, decoding, repetitive QEC, and …
The non-Markovianity is a recently proposed characterization of the non-Markovian behavior in an open quantum system, based on which we first present a practical idea for directly measuring the non-Markovian character of a single qubit coupled to a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, and then extend to investigate the dynamics of two noninteracting qubits subject to two reservoirs respectively with a lower bound of non-Markovianity. Our scheme, with no need of optimization procedures and quantum state tomography, is helpful for experimental implementation.
Protected qubits such as the 0-$π$ qubit, and bosonic qubits including cat qubits and GKP qubits offer advantages for fault-tolerance. Some of these protected qubits (e.g., 0-$π$ qubit and Kerr cat qubit) are stabilized by Hamiltonians which have (near-)degenerate ground state manifolds with large energy-gaps to the excited state manifolds. Without dissipative stabilization mechanisms the performance of such energy-gap-protected qubits can be limited by leakage to excited states. Here, we propose a scheme for dissipatively stabilizing an energy-gap-protected qubit using colored (i.e., frequenc…
We summarize our recent results for the induced exchange interaction due to thermal bosonic environment (bath) which also generates quantum noise. Our focus here is on the onset of the interaction. We demonstrate that the induced interaction can be used to manipulate and create entanglement over time scales sufficiently large for controlling the two-qubit system for quantum computing applications, though ultimately the noise effects will dominate.
Bosonic qubits are a promising route to building fault-tolerant quantum computers on a variety of physical platforms. Studying the performance of bosonic qubits under realistic gates and measurements is challenging with existing analytical and numerical tools. We present a novel formalism for simulating classes of states that can be represented as linear combinations of Gaussian functions in phase space. This formalism allows us to analyze and simulate a wide class of non-Gaussian states, transformations and measurements. We demonstrate how useful classes of bosonic qubits -- Gottesman-Kitaev-…
The boson sampling problem has brought a lot of attention in the quantum information field because it is not efficiently solvable with a classical computer; nonetheless it can be implemented with linear optical interferometers with single-boson sources. Recently, we introduced a more general problem, the multi-boson correlation sampling problem, which allows us to take advantage of the multi-mode spectral distribution of the bosonic sources together with time-correlated measurements in order to achieve sampling not only over the output ports of the interferometer but also over the joint detect…
We review some of the recent efforts in devising and engineering bosonic qubits for superconducting devices, with emphasis on the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) qubit. We present some new results on decoding repeated GKP error correction using finitely-squeezed GKP ancilla qubits, exhibiting differences with previously studied stochastic error models. We discuss circuit-QED ways to realize CZ gates between GKP qubits and we discuss different scenario's for using GKP and regular qubits as building blocks in a scalable superconducting surface code architecture.
High-fidelity qubit measurements play a crucial role in quantum computation, communication, and metrology. In recent experiments, it has been shown that readout fidelity may be improved by performing repeated quantum non-demolition (QND) readouts of a qubit's state through an ancilla. For a qubit encoded in a two-level system, the fidelity of such schemes is limited by the fact that a single error can destroy the information in the qubit. On the other hand, if a bosonic system is used, this fundamental limit could be overcome by utilizing higher levels such that a single error still leaves sta…
Non-Markovian dynamics of two interacting two-level qubits coupled to a bosonic bath was previously studied using the quantum-state-diffusion (QSD) equation, where a stochastic state is used to describe the system. In this study, we provide another perspective on this system by deriving the analytic form of the master equation, which describes the system with a reduced density matrix. Then, we validate the master equation by examining entanglement generation and state purity. In addition, with the master equation, we observe the effects from first-order noise and notice that a good asymptotic …
We study entanglement generated between a charge qubit and a bosonic bath due to their joint evolution which leads to pure dephasing of the qubit. We tune the parameters of the interaction, so that the decoherence is quantitatively independent of the number of bosonic modes taken into account and investigate, how the entanglement generated depends on the size of the environment. A second parameter of interest is the mixedness of the initial state of the environment which is controlled by temperature. We show analytically that for a pure initial state of the environment, entanglement does not d…
Bosonic qubits encoded in continuous-variable systems provide a promising alternative to two-level qubits for quantum computation and communication. So far, photon loss has been the dominant source of errors in bosonic qubits, but the significant reduction of photon loss in recent bosonic qubit experiments suggests that dephasing errors should also be considered. However, a detailed understanding of the combined photon loss and dephasing channel is lacking. Here, we show that, unlike its constituent parts, the combined loss-dephasing channel is non-degradable, pointing towards a richer structu…
Bosonic quantum error correction has proven to be a successful approach for extending the coherence of quantum memories, but to execute deep quantum circuits, high-fidelity gates between encoded qubits are needed. To that end, we present a family of error-detectable two-qubit gates for a variety of bosonic encodings. From a new geometric framework based on a "Bloch sphere" of bosonic operators, we construct $ZZ_L(θ)$ and $\text{eSWAP}(θ)$ gates for the binomial, 4-legged cat, dual-rail and several other bosonic codes. The gate Hamiltonian is simple to engineer, requiring only a programmable be…
We theoretically investigate the role of different phases of coupling constants in the dynamics of atoms and two cavity modes, observing deterministic generation of prototype or hybrid Bell, W, GHZ, and cluster states. Commonly induced dipole-dipole interactions (far-off resonance) are inhibited between particular pairs of qubits under suitable choice of those phases. We evaluate the generation fidelities when imperfections such as dissipative environments and time precision errors are considered. We show violation of local realism for the generated cluster state under such imperfections, even…
Quantum computation and communication are important branches of quantum information science. However, noise in realistic quantum devices fundamentally limits the utility of these quantum technologies. A conventional approach towards large-scale and fault-tolerant quantum information processing is to use multi-qubit quantum error correction (QEC), that is, to encode a logical quantum bit (or a logical qubit) redundantly over many physical qubits such that the redundancy can be used to detect errors. The required resource overhead associated with the use of conventional multi-qubit QEC schemes, …
We calculate the out-of-time-ordered correlation function (OTOC) of a single impurity qubit coupled to fully a connected many-particle system such as a bosonic Josephson junction or spins with long-range interactions. In these systems the qubit OTOC can be used to detect both ground state and excited state quantum phase transitions (QPTs), making it a robust order parameter that is considerably more sensitive than the standard one-body correlation function. Finite size scaling exponents for an $N$ body system can also be accurately extracted from the long-time OTOC dynamics, however, for short…
Quantum theory sets a limit on the minimum time required to transform from an initial state to a target state. It is known as quantum speed limit time. quantum speed limit time can be used to determine the rate of quantum evolution for closed and open quantum systems. Given that in the real world we are dealing with open quantum systems, the study of quantum speed limit time for such systems has particular importance. In this work we consider the topological qubit realized by two Majorana modes. We consider the case in which the topological qubit is influenced by fermionic and bosonic environm…
The unique features of quantum theory offer a powerful new paradigm for information processing. Translating these mathematical abstractions into useful algorithms and applications requires quantum systems with significant complexity and sufficiently low error rates. Such quantum systems must be made from robust hardware that can coherently store, process, and extract the encoded information, as well as possess effective quantum error correction (QEC) protocols to detect and correct errors. Circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) provides a promising hardware platform for implementing robust qua…
A standard theory of thermodynamics states that a quantum system in contact with a thermal environment relaxes to the equilibrium state known as the Gibbs state wherein decoherence occurs in the system's energy eigenbasis. When the interaction between the system and environment is strong, a different equilibrium state can be reached that is not diagonal in the system energy eigenbasis. Zurek's theory of einselection predicts that the decoherence takes place in the so-called pointer basis under the strong coupling regime, which can be viewed as continuous measurement of the system by the enviro…
We introduce a framework to decompose a bosonic mode into two virtual subsystems-a logical qubit and a gauge mode. This framework allows the entire toolkit of qubit-based quantum information to be applied in the continuous-variable setting. We give a detailed example based on a modular decomposition of the position basis and apply it in two situations. First, we decompose Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill grid states and find that the encoded logical state can be damaged due to entanglement with the gauge mode. Second, we identify and disentangle qubit cluster states hidden inside of Gaussian continuo…
When a quantum system is placed in thermal environments, we often assume that the system relaxes to the Gibbs state in which decoherence takes place in the system energy eigenbasis. However, when the coupling between the system and the environments is strong, the stationary state is not necessarily the Gibbs state due to environment-induced decoherence which can be interpreted as continuous measurement by the environments. Based on the einselection proposed by Zurek, we postulate that the Gibbs state is projected onto the pointer basis due to the continuous measurement. We justify the proposit…
Fast Bosonic Control via Multiphoton Qubit-Oscillator Interactions
Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学量子计算研究所）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学物理与天文学系）；Red Blue Quantum Inc.（红蓝量子有限公司）；Advanced ICT Research Institute, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology（国立情报学研究所先进ICT研究所）；Research Institute for Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science（东京科学大学理创研）；Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo（东京大学物理学系）
We analyze an entangling protocol to generate tripartite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states in a system consisting of three superconducting qubits with pairwise coupling. The dynamics of the open quantum system is investigated by taking into account the interaction of each qubit with an independent bosonic bath with an ohmic spectral structure. To this end a microscopic master equation is constructed and exactly solved. We find that the protocol here discussed is stable against decoherence and dissipation due to the presence of the external baths.
We study the suppression of qubit dephasing through Uhrig dynamical decoupling (UDD) in nontrivial environments modeled within the spin-boson formalism. In particular, we address the case of (i) a qubit coupled to a bosonic bath with power-law spectral density, and (ii) a qubit coupled to a single harmonic oscillator that dissipates energy into a bosonic bath, which embodies an example of a structured bath for the qubit. We then model the influence of random time jitter in the UDD protocol by sorting pulse-application times from Gaussian distributions centered at appropriate values dictated by…
We theoretically propose and experimentally implement a method of measuring a qubit by driving it close to the frequency of a dispersively coupled bosonic mode. The separation of the bosonic states corresponding to different qubit states begins essentially immediately at maximum rate, leading to a speedup in the measurement protocol. Also the bosonic mode can be simultaneously driven to optimize measurement speed and fidelity. We experimentally test this measurement protocol using a superconducting qubit coupled to a resonator mode. For a certain measurement time, we observe that the conventio…
We present a review of our recent results for the comparative evaluation of the induced exchange interaction and quantum noise mediated by the bosonic environment in two-qubit systems. We report new calculations for P-donor-electron spins in Si-Ge type materials. Challenges and open problems are discussed.
Fault-tolerant quantum computation by hybrid qubits with bosonic cat-code and single photons
Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Korea University（高丽大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学普里茨克分子工程学院）
The counter rotating-wave term (CRT) effects from the system-bath coherence on the dynamics of quantum correlation of two qubits in two independent baths and a common bath are systematically investigated. The hierarchy approach is extended to solve the relevant spin boson models with the Lorentzian spectrum, the exact dynamics for the quantum entanglement and quantum discord (QD) are evaluated, and the comparisons with previous ones under the rotating-wave approximation are performed. For the two independent baths, beyond the weak system-bath coupling, the CRT essentially changes the evolution…
Fully autonomous precise control of qubits is crucial for quantum information processing, quantum communication, and quantum sensing applications. It requires minimal human intervention on the ability to model, to predict and to anticipate the quantum dynamics [1,2], as well as to precisely control and calibrate single qubit operations. Here, we demonstrate single qubit autonomous calibrations via closed-loop optimisations of electron spin quantum operations in diamond. The operations are examined by quantum state and process tomographic measurements at room temperature, and their performances…
We show how to achieve perfect quantum state transfer and construct effective two-qubit gates between distant sites in engineered bosonic and fermionic networks. The Hamiltonian for the system can be determined by choosing an eigenvalue spectrum satisfying a certain condition, which is shown to be both sufficient and necessary in mirror-symmetrical networks. The natures of the effective two-qubit gates depend on the exchange symmetry for fermions and bosons. For fermionic networks, the gates are entangling (and thus universal for quantum computation). For bosonic networks, though the gates are…
Quantum state transfer from an information-carrying qubit to a receiving qubit is ubiquitous for quantum information technology. In a closed quantum system, this task requires precisely-timed control of coherent qubit-qubit interactions that are intrinsically reciprocal. Here, breaking reciprocity by tailoring dissipation in an open system, we show that it is possible to autonomously transfer a quantum state between stationary qubits without time-dependent control. We present the general requirements for this directional transfer process, and show that the minimum system dimension for transfer…
Since John Bell formulated his paramount inequality for a pair of spin-$1/2$ particles, quantum mechanics has been confronted with the postulates of local realism with various equivalent configurations. Current technology, with its advanced manipulation and detection methods, allows to extend the Bell tests to more complex structures. The aim of this work is to analyze a set of Bell inequalities suitable for a possibly broad family of many-body systems with the focus on bosonic qubits. We develop a method that allows for a step-by-step study of the many-body Bell correlations, for instance amo…
Large-scale quantum computers will inevitably need quantum error correction to protect information against decoherence. Traditional error correction typically requires many qubits, along with high-efficiency error syndrome measurement and real-time feedback. Autonomous quantum error correction (AQEC) instead uses steady-state bath engineering to perform the correction in a hardware-efficient manner. We realize an AQEC scheme, implemented with only two transmon qubits in a 2D scalable architecture, that actively corrects single-photon loss and passively suppresses low-frequency dephasing using …
We discuss the generation of states close to the boundary-family of maximally entangled mixed states as defined by the use of concurrence and linear entropy. The coupling of two qubits to a dissipation-affected bosonic mode is able to produce a bipartite state having, for all practical purposes, the entanglement and purity properties of one of such boundary states. We thoroughly study the effects that thermal and squeezed character of the bosonic mode have in such a process and we discuss tolerance to qubit phase-damping mechanisms. The non-demanding nature of the scheme makes it realizable in…
