Christopher Granade

Hamiltonian learning and certification using quantum resources.

In recent years quantum simulation has made great strides, culminating in experiments that existing supercomputers cannot easily simulate. Although this raises the possibility that special purpose analog quantum simulators may be able to perform computational tasks that existing computers cannot, it also introduces a major challenge: certifying that the quantum simulator is in fact simulating the correct quantum dynamics. We provide an algorithm that, under relatively weak assumptions, can be used to efficiently infer the Hamiltonian of a large but untrusted quantum simulator using a trusted quantum simulator. We illustrate the power of this approach by showing numerically that it can inexpensively learn the Hamiltonians for large frustrated Ising models, demonstrating that quantum resources can make certifying analog quantum simulators tractable.

Estimating the coherence of noise

Noise mechanisms in quantum systems can be broadly characterized as either coherent (i.e., unitary) or incoherent. For a given fixed average error rate, coherent noise mechanisms will generally lead to a larger worst-case error than incoherent noise. We show that the coherence of a noise source can be quantified by the unitarity, which we relate to the average change in purity averaged over input pure states. We then show that the unitarity can be efficiently estimated using a protocol based on randomized benchmarking that is efficient and robust to state-preparation and measurement errors. We also show that the unitarity provides a lower bound on the optimal achievable gate infidelity under a given noisy process.

Parallel information transfer in a multinode quantum information processor.

We describe a method for coupling disjoint quantum bits (qubits) in different local processing nodes of a distributed node quantum information processor. An effective channel for information transfer between nodes is obtained by moving the system into an interaction frame where all pairs of cross-node qubits are effectively coupled via an exchange interaction between actuator elements of each node. All control is achieved via actuator-only modulation, leading to fast implementations of a universal set of internode quantum gates. The method is expected to be nearly independent of actuator decoherence and may be made insensitive to experimental variations of system parameters by appropriate design of control sequences. We show, in particular, how the induced cross-node coupling channel may be used to swap the complete quantum states of the local processors in parallel.

Efficient Bayesian Phase Estimation.

We introduce a new method called rejection filtering that we use to perform adaptive Bayesian phase estimation. Our approach has several advantages: it is classically efficient, easy to implement, achieves Heisenberg limited scaling, resists depolarizing noise, tracks time-dependent eigenstates, recovers from failures, and can be run on a field programmable gate array. It also outperforms existing iterative phase estimation algorithms such as Kitaevs method.

Accelerated randomized benchmarking

Quantum information processing offers promising advances for a wide range of fields and applications, provided that we can efficiently assess the performance of the control applied in candidate systems. That is, we must be able to determine whether we have implemented a desired gate, and refine accordingly. Randomized benchmarking reduces the difficulty of this task by exploiting symmetries in quantum operations. Here, we bound the resources required for benchmarking and show that, with prior information, we can achieve several orders of magnitude better accuracy than in traditional approaches to benchmarking. Moreover, by building on state-of-the-art classical algorithms, we reach these accuracies with near-optimal resources. Our approach requires an order of magnitude less data to achieve the same accuracies and to provide online estimates of the errors in the reported fidelities. We also show that our approach is useful for physical devices by comparing to simulations.

Quantum bootstrapping via compressed quantum Hamiltonian learning

A major problem facing the development of quantum computers or large scale quantum simulators is that general methods for characterizing and controlling are intractable. We provide a new approach to this problem that uses small quantum simulators to efficiently characterize and learn control models for larger devices. Our protocol achieves this by using Bayesian inference in concert with Lieb–Robinson bounds and interactive quantum learning methods to achieve compressed simulations for characterization. We also show that the Lieb–Robinson velocity is epistemic for our protocol, meaning that information propagates at a rate that depends on the uncertainty in the system Hamiltonian. We illustrate the efficiency of our bootstrapping protocol by showing numerically that an 8 qubit Ising model simulator can be used to calibrate and control a 50 qubit Ising simulator while using only about 750 kilobits of experimental data. Finally, we provide upper bounds for the Fisher information that show that the number of experiments needed to characterize a system rapidly diverges as the duration of the experiments used in the characterization shrinks, which motivates the use of methods such as ours that do not require short evolution times.

Adaptive Hamiltonian estimation using Bayesian experimental design

Using Bayesian experimental design techniques, we have shown that for a single twolevel quantum mechanical system under strong (projective) measurement, the dynamical parameters of a model Hamiltonian can be estimated with exponentially improved accuracy over offline estimation strategies. To achieve this, we derive an adaptive protocol which finds the optimal experiments based on previous observations. We show that the risk associated with this algorithm is close to the global optimum, given a uniform prior. Additionally, we show that sampling at the Nyquist rate is not optimal.

Accounting for Classical Hardware in the Control of Quantum Devices

High fidelity coherent control of quantum systems is critical to building quantum devices and quantum computers. We provide a general optimal control framework for designing control sequences that account for hardware control distortions while maintaining robustness to environmental noise. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithm by presenting examples of robust quantum gates optimized in the presence of nonlinear distortions. We show that nonlinear classical controllers do not necessarily incur additional computational cost to pulse optimization, enabling more powerful quantum devices.

Quantum Hamiltonian learning using imperfect quantum resources

Identifying an accurate model for the dynamics of a quantum system is a vexing problem that underlies a range of problems in experimental physics and quantum information theory. Recently, a method called quantum Hamiltonian learning has been proposed by the present authors that uses quantum simulation as a resource for modeling an unknown quantum system. This approach can, under certain circumstances, allow such models to be efficiently identified. A major caveat of that work is the assumption of that all elements of the protocol are noise-free. Here, we show that quantum Hamiltonian learning can tolerate substantial amounts of depolarizing noise and show numerical evidence that it can tolerate noise drawn from other realistic models. We further provide evidence that the learning algorithm will find a model that is maximally close to the true model in cases where the hypothetical model lacks terms present in the true model. Finally, we also provide numerical evidence that the algorithm works for non-commuting models. This work illustrates that quantum Hamiltonian learning can be performed using realistic resources and suggests that even imperfect quantum resources may be valuable for characterizing quantum systems.

Practical adaptive quantum tomography

We introduce a fast and accurate heuristic for adaptive tomography that addresses many of the limitations of prior methods. Previous approaches were either too computationally intensive or tailored to handle special cases such as single qubits or pure states. By contrast, our approach combines the efficiency of online optimization with generally applicable and well-motivated data-processing techniques. We numerically demonstrate these advantages in several scenarios including mixed states, higher-dimensional systems, and restricted measurements.