Fault-tolerant Quantum Communication with Minimal Physical Requirements

We describe a novel protocol for a quantum repeater which enables long distance quantum communication through realistic, lossy photonic channels. Contrary to previous proposals, our protocol incorporates active purification of arbitrary errors at each step of the protocol using only two qubits at each repeater station. Because of these minimal physical requirements, the present protocol can be realized in simple physical systems such as solid-state single photon emitters. As an example, we show how nitrogen vacancy color centers in diamond can be used to implement the protocol, using the nuclear and electronic spin to form the two qubits.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. V2: Minor modifications. V3: Major changes in the presentation and new titl

Effect of helicity and rotation on the free decay of turbulent flows

The self-similar decay of energy in a turbulent flow is studied in direct numerical simulations with and without rotation. Two initial conditions are considered: one non-helical (mirror-symmetric), and one with maximal helicity. The results show that, while in the absence of rotation the energy in the helical and non-helical cases decays with the same rate, in rotating flows the helicity content has a major impact on the decay rate. These differences are associated with differences in the energy and helicity cascades when rotation is present. Properties of the structures that arise in the flow at late times in each time are also discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Thermal Effects on the Magnetic Field Dependence of Spin Transfer Induced Magnetization Reversal

We have developed a self-aligned, high-yield process to fabricate CPP (current perpendicular to the plane) magnetic sensors of sub 100 nm dimensions. A pinned synthetic antiferromagnet (SAF) is used as the reference layer which minimizes dipole coupling to the free layer and field induced rotation of the reference layer. We find that the critical currents for spin transfer induced magnetization reversal of the free layer vary dramatically with relatively small changes the in-plane magnetic field, in contrast to theoretical predictions based on stability analysis of the Gilbert equations of magnetization dynamics including Slonczewski-type spin-torque terms. The discrepancy is believed due to thermal fluctuations over the time scale of the measurements. Once thermal fluctuations are taken into account, we find good quantitative agreement between our experimental results and numerical simulations.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, Submitted to Appl. Phys. Lett., Comparison of some of these results with a model described by N. Smith in cond-mat/040648

Coherence of an optically illuminated single nuclear spin qubit

We investigate the coherence properties of individual nuclear spin quantum bits in diamond [Dutt et al., Science, 316, 1312 (2007)] when a proximal electronic spin associated with a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is being interrogated by optical radiation. The resulting nuclear spin dynamics are governed by time-dependent hyperfine interaction associated with rapid electronic transitions, which can be described by a spin-fluctuator model. We show that due to a process analogous to motional averaging in nuclear magnetic resonance, the nuclear spin coherence can be preserved after a large number of optical excitation cycles. Our theoretical analysis is in good agreement with experimental results. It indicates a novel approach that could potentially isolate the nuclear spin system completely from the electronic environment.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Universal dynamical decoupling of a single solid-state spin from a spin bath

Controlling the interaction of a single quantum system with its environment is a fundamental challenge in quantum science and technology. We dramatically suppress the coupling of a single spin in diamond with the surrounding spin bath by using double-axis dynamical decoupling. The coherence is preserved for arbitrary quantum states, as verified by quantum process tomography. The resulting coherence time enhancement is found to follow a general scaling with the number of decoupling pulses. No limit is observed for the decoupling action up to 136 pulses, for which the coherence time is enhanced more than 25 times compared to spin echo. These results uncover a new regime for experimental quantum science and allow to overcome a major hurdle for implementing quantum information protocols.Comment: submitted 24 May 2010; published online 9 September 201

Effective diffusion of scalar fields in a chaotic flow

Copyright © 2008 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Physics of Fluids 20 (2008) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?PHFLE6/20/107103/1The advection of a tracer field in a fluid flow can create complex scalar structures and increase the effect of weak diffusion by orders of magnitude. One tool to quantify this is to measure the flux of scalar across contour lines of constant scalar. This gives a diffusion equation in area coordinates with an effective diffusion that depends on the structure of the scalar field and, in particular, takes large values when scalar contours become very extended. The present paper studies the properties of this effective diffusion using a mixture of analytical and numerical tools. First the presence of hyperbolic stationary points, that is, saddles, in the scalar concentration field is investigated analytically, and it is shown that these give rise to singular spikes in the effective diffusion. This is confirmed in numerical simulations in which complex scalar fields are generated using a time-periodic flow. Issues of numerical resolution are discussed and results are given on the dependence of the effective diffusion on grid resolution and discretization in area or scalar values. These simulations show complex dependence of the effective diffusion on time as saddle points appear and disappear in the scalar field. It is found that time averaging (in the presence of an additional scalar source term) removes this dependence to leave robust results for the effective diffusion

Optimal approach to quantum communication using dynamic programming

Reliable preparation of entanglement between distant systems is an outstanding problem in quantum information science and quantum communication. In practice, this has to be accomplished via noisy channels (such as optical fibers) that generally result in exponential attenuation of quantum signals at large distances. A special class of quantum error correction protocols--quantum repeater protocols--can be used to overcome such losses. In this work, we introduce a method for systematically optimizing existing protocols and developing new, more efficient protocols. Our approach makes use of a dynamic programming-based searching algorithm, the complexity of which scales only polynomially with the communication distance, letting us efficiently determine near-optimal solutions. We find significant improvements in both the speed and the final state fidelity for preparing long distance entangled states.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure