Time-reversed two-photon interferometry for phase super-resolution

We observed two-photon phase super-resolution in an unbalanced Michelson interferometer with classical Gaussian laser pulses. Our work is a time-reversed version of a two-photon interference experiment using an unbalanced Michelson interferometer. A measured interferogram exhibits two-photon phase super-resolution with a high visibility of 97.9% \pm 0.4%. Its coherence length is about 22 times longer than that of the input laser pulses. It is a classical analogue to the large difference between the one- and two-photon coherence lengths of entangled photon pairs.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Observation of nonlinear variations in three-vertex geometric phase in two-photon polarization qutrit

We experimentally observed nonlinear variations in the three-vertex geometric phase in a two- photon polarization qutrit. The three-vertex geometric phase is defined by three quantum states, which generally forms a three-state (qutrit) system. By changing one of the three constituent states, we observed two rapid increases in the three-vertex geometric phase. The observed variations are inherent in a three-state system and cannot be observed in a two-state system. We used a time-reversed two-photon interferometer to measure the geometric phase with much more intense signals than those of a typical two-photon interferometer.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Power of Quantum Computation with Few Clean Qubits

This paper investigates the power of polynomial-time quantum computation in which only a very limited number of qubits are initially clean in the |0> state, and all the remaining qubits are initially in the totally mixed state. No initializations of qubits are allowed during the computation, nor intermediate measurements. The main results of this paper are unexpectedly strong error-reducible properties of such quantum computations. It is proved that any problem solvable by a polynomial-time quantum computation with one-sided bounded error that uses logarithmically many clean qubits can also be solvable with exponentially small one-sided error using just two clean qubits, and with polynomially small one-sided error using just one clean qubit. It is further proved in the case of two-sided bounded error that any problem solvable by such a computation with a constant gap between completeness and soundness using logarithmically many clean qubits can also be solvable with exponentially small two-sided error using just two clean qubits. If only one clean qubit is available, the problem is again still solvable with exponentially small error in one of the completeness and soundness and polynomially small error in the other. As an immediate consequence of the above result for the two-sided-error case, it follows that the TRACE ESTIMATION problem defined with fixed constant threshold parameters is complete for the classes of problems solvable by polynomial-time quantum computations with completeness 2/3 and soundness 1/3 using logarithmically many clean qubits and just one clean qubit. The techniques used for proving the error-reduction results may be of independent interest in themselves, and one of the technical tools can also be used to show the hardness of weak classical simulations of one-clean-qubit computations (i.e., DQC1 computations).Comment: 44 pages + cover page; the results in Section 8 are overlapping with the main results in arXiv:1409.677

Bloch sphere representation of three-vertex geometric phases

The properties of the geometric phases between three quantum states are investigated in a high-dimensional Hilbert space using the Majorana representation of symmetric quantum states. We found that the geometric phases between the three quantum states in an N-state quantum system can be represented by N-1 spherical triangles on the Bloch sphere. The parameter dependence of the geometric phase was analyzed based on this picture. We found that the geometric phase exhibits rich nonlinear behavior in a high-dimensional Hilbert space.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

ZZ-Interaction-Free Single-Qubit-Gate Optimization in Superconducting Qubits

Overcoming the issue of qubit-frequency fluctuations is essential to realize stable and practical quantum computing with solid-state qubits. Static ZZ interaction, which causes a frequency shift of a qubit depending on the state of neighboring qubits, is one of the major obstacles to integrating fixed-frequency transmon qubits. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate ZZ-interaction-free single-qubit-gate operations on a superconducting transmon qubit by utilizing a semi-analytically optimized pulse based on a perturbative analysis. The gate is designed to be robust against slow qubit-frequency fluctuations. The robustness of the optimized gate spans a few MHz, which is sufficient for suppressing the adverse effects of the ZZ interaction. Our result paves the way for an efficient approach to overcoming the issue of ZZ interaction without any additional hardware overhead.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures plus Supplementary Information (4 pages, 2 figures