npj Quantum Information最新文献

We propose and analyze a universal method to obtain fast charging of a quantum battery by a driven charger system using controlled, pure dephasing of the charger. While the battery displays coherent underdamped oscillations of energy for weak charger dephasing, the quantum Zeno freezing of the charger energy at high dephasing suppresses the rate of transfer of energy to the battery. Choosing an optimum dephasing rate between the regimes leads to a fast charging of the battery. We illustrate our results with the charger and battery modeled by either two-level systems or harmonic oscillators. Apart from the fast charging, the dephasing also renders the charging performance more robust to detuning between the charger, drive, and battery frequencies for the two-level systems case.

Quantum error mitigation, a data processing technique for recovering the statistics of target processes from their noisy version, is a crucial task for near-term quantum technologies. Most existing methods require prior knowledge of the noise model or the noise parameters. Deep neural networks have the potential to lift this requirement, but current models require training data produced by ideal processes in the absence of noise. Here we build a neural model that achieves quantum error mitigation without any prior knowledge of the noise and without training on noise-free data. To achieve this feature, we introduce a quantum augmentation technique for error mitigation. Our approach applies to quantum circuits and to the dynamics of many-body and continuous-variable quantum systems, accommodating various types of noise models. We demonstrate its effectiveness by testing it both on simulated noisy circuits and on real quantum hardware.

We explore the first-order phase transition in the lattice Schwinger model in the presence of a topological θ-term by means of the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). Using two different fermion discretizations, Wilson and staggered fermions, we develop parametric ansatz circuits suitable for both discretizations, and compare their performance by simulating classically an ideal VQE optimization in the absence of noise. The states obtained by the classical simulation are then prepared on the IBM’s superconducting quantum hardware. Applying state-of-the art error-mitigation methods, we show that the electric field density and particle number, observables which reveal the phase structure of the model, can be reliably obtained from the quantum hardware. To investigate the minimum system sizes required for a continuum extrapolation, we study the continuum limit using matrix product states, and compare our results to continuum mass perturbation theory. We demonstrate that taking the additive mass renormalization into account is vital for enhancing the precision that can be obtained with smaller system sizes. Furthermore, for the observables we investigate we observe excellent agreement in the continuum limit of both fermion discretizations.

The twin-field class quantum key distribution (TF-class QKD) has experimentally demonstrated the ability to surpass the fundamental rate-distance limit without requiring a quantum repeater, as a revolutional milestone. In TF-class QKD implementation, an optical phase-locked loop (OPLL) structure is commonly employed to generate a reference light with correlated phase, ensuring coherence of optical fields between Alice and Bob. In this configuration, the reference light, typically located in the untrusted station Charlie, solely provides wavelength reference for OPLL and does not participate in quantum-state encoding. However, the reference light may open a door for Eve to enter the source stations that are supposed to be well protected. Here, by identifying vulnerabilities of an acousto-optic modulator (AOM) in the OPLL scheme, we propose and demonstrate a wavelength-switching attack on a TF-class QKD system. This attack involves Eve deliberately manipulating the wavelength of the reference light to increase mean photon number of prepared quantum states, while maintaining stable interference between Alice and Bob as required by TF-class QKD protocols. The maximum observed increase in mean photon number is 8.7%, which has been theoretically proven to compromise the security of a TF-class QKD system. Moreover, we have shown that with well calibration of the modulators, the attack can be eliminated. Through this study, we highlight the importance of system calibration in the practical security in TF-class QKD implementation.

We perform readout of a quantum-dot hybrid qubit coupled to a superconducting resonator through a parametric, longitudinal interaction mechanism. Our experiments are performed with the qubit and resonator frequencies detuned by ~10 GHz, demonstrating that longitudinal coupling can facilitate semiconductor qubit operation in the ‘ultra-dispersive’ regime of circuit quantum electrodynamics.

Among various classes of quantum error correcting codes (QECCs), non-stabilizer codes have rich properties and are of theoretical and practical interest. Decoding non-stabilizer codes is, however, a highly non-trivial task. In this paper, we show that a decoding circuit for Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes can be straightforwardly extended to handle general QECCs. The key to the extension lies in the use of a pair of classical-quantum (CQ) codes associated with the QECC to be decoded. The decoding error of the proposed decoding circuit depends on the classical decoding errors of the CQ codes and their degree of complementarity. We demonstrate the power of the decoding circuit in a toy model of the black hole information paradox, improving decoding errors compared to previous results. In addition, we reveal that black hole dynamics may optimally encode quantum information but poorly encode classical information.

Extended quantum networks are based on quantum repeaters that often rely on the distribution of entanglement in an efficient and heralded fashion over multiple network nodes. Many repeater architectures require multiplexed sources of entangled photon pairs, multiplexed quantum memories, and photon detection that distinguishes between the multiplexed modes. Here we demonstrate the concurrent employment of (1) spectrally multiplexed cavity-enhanced spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a nonlinear crystal; (2) a virtually-imaged phased array that enables mapping of spectral modes onto distinct spatial modes for frequency-selective detection; and (3) a cryogenically-cooled Tm³⁺:LiNbO₃ crystal that allows spectral filtering in an approach that anticipates its use as a spectrally-multiplexed quantum memory. Through coincidence measurements, we demonstrate quantum correlations between energy-correlated photon pairs and a strong reduction of the correlation strength between all other photons. This constitutes an important step towards a frequency-multiplexed quantum repeater.

Simulating the dynamics of open quantum systems is essential in achieving practical quantum computation and understanding novel nonequilibrium behaviors. However, quantum simulation of a many-body system coupled to an engineered reservoir has yet to be fully explored in present-day experiment platforms. In this work, we introduce engineered noise into a one-dimensional ten-qubit superconducting quantum processor to emulate a generic many-body open quantum system. Our approach originates from the stochastic unravellings of the master equation. By measuring the end-to-end correlation, we identify multiple steady states stemmed from a strong symmetry, which is established on the modified Hamiltonian via Floquet engineering. Furthermore, we investigate the structure of the steady-state manifold by preparing initial states as a superposition of states within different sectors on a five-qubit chain. Our work provides a manageable and hardware-efficient strategy for the open-system quantum simulation.

Quantum control of a linear oscillator using a static dispersive coupling to a nonlinear ancilla underpins a wide variety of experiments in circuit QED. Extending this control to more than one oscillator while minimizing the required connectivity to the ancilla would enable hardware-efficient multi-mode entanglement and measurements. We show that the spectrum of an ancilla statically coupled to a single mode can be made to depend on the joint photon number in two modes by applying a strong parametric beamsplitter coupling between them. This ‘joint-photon number-splitting’ regime extends single-oscillator techniques to two-oscillator control, which we use to realize a hardware-efficient erasure check for a dual-rail qubit encoded in two superconducting cavities. This scheme leverages the high-fidelity beamsplitter coupling already required for single- and two-qubit gates while permitting minimal crosstalk between circuit elements. Furthermore, the flexibility to choose the pulse shape allows us to limit the susceptibility to different error channels. We use this scheme to detect leakage errors with a missed erasure fraction of (9.0 ± 0.5) × 10⁻⁴ while incurring an erasure rate of 2.92 ± 0.01% and a Pauli error rate of 0.31 ± 0.01%, both of which are dominated by cavity errors.

To achieve scalable universal quantum computing, we need to implement a universal set of logical gates fault-tolerantly, for which the main difficulty lies with non-Clifford gates. We demonstrate that several characteristic features of the reconfigurable atom array platform are inherently well-suited for addressing this key challenge, potentially leading to significant advantages in fidelity and efficiency. Specifically, we consider a series of different strategies, including magic state distillation, concatenated code array, and fault-tolerant logical multi-controlled-Z gates, leveraging key platform features such as nonlocal connectivity, parallel gate action, collective mobility, and native multi-controlled-Z gates. Our analysis provides valuable insights into the efficient experimental realization of logical gates, serving as a guide for the full-cycle demonstration of fault-tolerant quantum computation with reconfigurable atom arrays.