2,080 research outputs found
Practical characterization of quantum devices without tomography
Quantum tomography is the main method used to assess the quality of quantum
information processing devices, but its complexity presents a major obstacle
for the characterization of even moderately large systems. The number of
experimental settings required to extract complete information about a device
grows exponentially with its size, and so does the running time for processing
the data generated by these experiments. Part of the problem is that tomography
generates much more information than is usually sought. Taking a more targeted
approach, we develop schemes that enable (i) estimating the fidelity of an
experiment to a theoretical ideal description, (ii) learning which description
within a reduced subset best matches the experimental data. Both these
approaches yield a significant reduction in resources compared to tomography.
In particular, we demonstrate that fidelity can be estimated from a number of
simple experimental settings that is independent of the system size, removing
an important roadblock for the experimental study of larger quantum information
processing units.Comment: (v1) 11 pages, 1 table, 4 figures. (v2) See also the closely related
work: arXiv:1104.4695 (v3) method extended to continuous variable systems
(v4) updated to published versio
First-order sidebands in circuit QED using qubit frequency modulation
Sideband transitions have been shown to generate controllable interaction
between superconducting qubits and microwave resonators. Up to now, these
transitions have been implemented with voltage drives on the qubit or the
resonator, with the significant disadvantage that such implementations only
lead to second-order sideband transitions. Here we propose an approach to
achieve first-order sideband transitions by relying on controlled oscillations
of the qubit frequency using a flux-bias line. Not only can first-order
transitions be significantly faster, but the same technique can be employed to
implement other tunable qubit-resonator and qubit-qubit interactions. We
discuss in detail how such first-order sideband transitions can be used to
implement a high fidelity controlled-NOT operation between two transmons
coupled to the same resonator.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure
Demonstration of Robust Quantum Gate Tomography via Randomized Benchmarking
Typical quantum gate tomography protocols struggle with a self-consistency
problem: the gate operation cannot be reconstructed without knowledge of the
initial state and final measurement, but such knowledge cannot be obtained
without well-characterized gates. A recently proposed technique, known as
randomized benchmarking tomography (RBT), sidesteps this self-consistency
problem by designing experiments to be insensitive to preparation and
measurement imperfections. We implement this proposal in a superconducting
qubit system, using a number of experimental improvements including
implementing each of the elements of the Clifford group in single `atomic'
pulses and custom control hardware to enable large overhead protocols. We show
a robust reconstruction of several single-qubit quantum gates, including a
unitary outside the Clifford group. We demonstrate that RBT yields physical
gate reconstructions that are consistent with fidelities obtained by randomized
benchmarking
Achieving minimum-error discrimination of an arbitrary set of laser-light pulses
Laser light is widely used for communication and sensing applications, so the
optimal discrimination of coherent states--the quantum states of light emitted
by a laser--has immense practical importance. However, quantum mechanics
imposes a fundamental limit on how well different coher- ent states can be
distinguished, even with perfect detectors, and limits such discrimination to
have a finite minimum probability of error. While conventional optical
receivers lead to error rates well above this fundamental limit, Dolinar found
an explicit receiver design involving optical feedback and photon counting that
can achieve the minimum probability of error for discriminating any two given
coherent states. The generalization of this construction to larger sets of
coherent states has proven to be challenging, evidencing that there may be a
limitation inherent to a linear-optics-based adaptive measurement strategy. In
this Letter, we show how to achieve optimal discrimination of any set of
coherent states using a resource-efficient quantum computer. Our construction
leverages a recent result on discriminating multi-copy quantum hypotheses
(arXiv:1201.6625) and properties of coherent states. Furthermore, our
construction is reusable, composable, and applicable to designing
quantum-limited processing of coherent-state signals to optimize any metric of
choice. As illustrative examples, we analyze the performance of discriminating
a ternary alphabet, and show how the quantum circuit of a receiver designed to
discriminate a binary alphabet can be reused in discriminating multimode
hypotheses. Finally, we show our result can be used to achieve the quantum
limit on the rate of classical information transmission on a lossy optical
channel, which is known to exceed the Shannon rate of all conventional optical
receivers.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures; v2 Minor correction
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