Daniel J. Egger

Adaptive hybrid optimal quantum control for imprecisely characterized systems.

Optimal quantum control theory carries a huge promise for quantum technology. Its experimental application, however, is often hindered by imprecise knowledge of the input variables, the quantum systems parameters. We show how to overcome this by adaptive hybrid optimal control, using a protocol named Ad-HOC. This protocol combines open- and closed-loop optimal control by first performing a gradient search towards a near-optimal control pulse and then an experimental fidelity estimation with a gradient-free method. For typical settings in solid-state quantum information processing, adaptive hybrid optimal control enhances gate fidelities by an order of magnitude, making optimal control theory applicable and useful.

Multimode circuit quantum electrodynamics with hybrid metamaterial transmission lines.

Quantum transmission lines are central to superconducting and hybrid quantum computing. In this work we show how coupling them to a left-handed transmission line allows circuit QED to reach a new regime: multimode ultrastrong coupling. Out of the many potential applications of this novel device, we discuss the preparation of multipartite entangled states and the simulation of the spin-boson model where a quantum phase transition is reached up to finite size effects.

Single-qubit gates in frequency-crowded transmon systems

Recent experimental work on superconducting transmon qubits in three-dimensional (3D) cavities shows that their coherence times are increased by an order of magnitude compared to their two-dimensional cavity counterparts. However, to take advantage of these coherence times while scaling up the number of qubits it is advantageous to address individual qubits which are all coupled to the same 3D cavity fields. The challenge in controlling this system comes from spectral crowding, where the leakage transition of qubits is close to computational transitions in other qubits. Here, it is shown that fast pulses are possible which address single qubits using two-quadrature control of the pulse envelope, while the derivative removal by adiabatic gate method of Motzoi et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 110501 (2009)] alone only gives marginal improvements over the conventional Gaussian pulse shape. On the other hand, a first-order result using the Magnus expansion gives a fast analytical pulse shape which gives a high-fidelity gate for a specific gate time, up to a phase factor on the second qubit. Further numerical analysis corroborates these results and yields to even faster gates, showing that leakage-state anharmonicity does not provide a fundamental quantum speed limit.

Quantum optimization using variational algorithms on near-term quantum devices

Universal fault-tolerant quantum computers will require error-free execution of long sequences of quantum gate operations, which is expected to involve millions of physical qubits. Before the full power of such machines will be available, near-term quantum devices will provide several hundred qubits and limited error correction. Still, there is a realistic prospect to run useful algorithms within the limited circuit depth of such devices. Particularly promising are optimization algorithms that follow a hybrid approach: the aim is to steer a highly entangled state on a quantum system to a target state that minimizes a cost function via variation of some gate parameters. This variational approach can be used both for classical optimization problems as well as for problems in quantum chemistry. The challenge is to converge to the target state given the limited coherence time and connectivity of the qubits. In this context, the quantum volume as a metric to compare the power of near-term quantum devices is discussed. With focus on chemistry applications, a general description of variational algorithms is provided and the mapping from fermions to qubits is explained. Coupled-cluster and heuristic trial wave-functions are considered for efficiently finding molecular ground states. Furthermore, simple error-mitigation schemes are introduced that could improve the accuracy of determining ground-state energies. Advancing these techniques may lead to near-term demonstrations of useful quantum computation with systems containing several hundred qubits.

Optimal control of a quantum measurement

Pulses to steer the time evolution of quantum systems can be designed with optimal control theory. In most cases it is the coherent processes that can be controlled and one optimizes the time evolution towards a target unitary process, sometimes also in the presence of non-controllable incoherent processes. Here we show how to extend the GRAPE algorithm in the case where the incoherent processes are controllable and the target time evolution is a non-unitary quantum channel. We perform a gradient search on a fidelity measure based on Choi matrices. We illustrate our algorithm by optimizing a phase qubit measurement pulse. We show how this technique can lead to large measurement contrast close to 99%. We also show, within the validity of our model, that this algorithm can produce short 1.4 ns pulses with 98.2% contrast.