Dynamic Cooling on Contemporary Quantum Computers

Abstract

We study the problem of dynamic cooling whereby a target qubit is cooled at the expense of heating up $N-1$ further identical qubits by means of a global unitary operation. A standard back-of-the-envelope high-temperature estimate establishes that the target qubit temperature can be dynamically cooled by at most a factor of $1/\sqrt{N}$. Here we provide the exact expression for the minimum temperature to which the target qubit can be cooled and reveal that there is a crossover from the high initial temperature regime, where the scaling is $1/\sqrt{N}$, to a low initial temperature regime, where a much faster scaling of $1/N$ occurs. This slow, $1/\sqrt{N}$ scaling, which was relevant for early high-temperature NMR quantum computers, is the reason dynamic cooling was dismissed as ineffectual around 20 years ago; the fact that current low-temperature quantum computers fall in the fast, $1/N$ scaling regime, reinstates the appeal of dynamic cooling today. We further show that the associated work cost of cooling is exponentially more advantageous in the low-temperature regime. We discuss the implementation of dynamic cooling in terms of quantum circuits and examine the effects of hardware noise. We successfully demonstrate dynamic cooling in a three-qubit system on a real quantum processor. Since the circuit size grows quickly with $N$, scaling dynamic cooling to larger systems on noisy devices poses a challenge. We therefore propose a suboptimal cooling algorithm, whereby relinquishing a small amount of cooling capability results in a drastically reduced circuit complexity, greatly facilitating the implementation of dynamic cooling on near-future quantum computers.