The physical system is commonly considered memoryless to simplify its dynamics, which is called a Markov assumption. However, memory effect is a fundamental phenomenon in the universe.In the quantum regime, this effect is roughly attributed to the correlated noise. With quantum measurements often collapsing the quantum state, it is hard to characterize non-Markovianity of quantum dynamics. Based on the recently developed framework by Pollock et al., we design a 2-step quantum process, where one qubit is the system and another ancilla serves as its environment. In a superconducting processor, the restricted quantum process tensor is determined using a set of sequential projective measurements, and the result is then used to predict the output state of the process. When the environment has memory, we have achieved very high fidelity in predicting the final state of the system (99.86%±1.1‰). We further take a closer look at the cause of the memory effect and quantify the non-Markovianity of the quantum process conditioned on the historical operations.
The experimental optimization of a two-qubit controlled-Z (CZ) gate is realized following two different data-driven gradient ascent pulse engineering (GRAPE) protocols in the aim ofoptimizing the gate operator and the output quantum state, respectively. For both GRAPE protocols, the key computation of gradients utilizes mixed information of the input Z-control pulse and the experimental measurement. With an imperfect initial pulse in a flattop waveform, our experimental implementation shows that the CZ gate is quickly improved and the gate fidelities subject to the two optimized pulses are around 99%. Our experimental study confirms the applicability of the data-driven GRAPE protocols in the problem of the gate optimization.
Measurement-based feedback control is central in quantum computing and precise quantum control. Here we realize a fast and flexible field-programmable-gate-array-based feedback controlin a superconducting Xmon qubit system. The latency of room-temperature electronics is custom optimized to be as short as 140 ns. Projective measurement of a signal qubit produces a feedback tag to actuate a conditional pulse gate to the qubit. In a feed-forward process, the measurement-based feedback tag is brought to a different target qubit for a conditional control. In a two-qubit experiment, the feedback and feed-forward controls are simultaneously actuated in consecutive steps. A quantum number is then generated by the signal qubit, and a random walk of the target qubit is correspondingly triggered and realized on the Bloch sphere. Our experiment provides a conceptually simple and intuitive benchmark for the feedback control in a multi-qubit system. The feedback control can also be further explored to study complex stochastic quantum control.
Geometric phases are only dependent on evolution paths but independent of evolution details so that they own some intrinsic noise-resilience features. Based on different geometric phases,various quantum gates have been proposed, such as nonadiabatic geometric gates based on nonadiabatic Abelian geometric phases and nonadiabatic holonomic gates based on nonadiabatic non-Abelian geometric phases. Up to now, nonadiabatic holonomic one-qubit gates have been experimentally demonstrated with the supercondunting transmon, where three lowest levels with cascaded configuration are all applied in the operation. However, the second excited states of transmons have relatively short coherence time, which results in a lessened fidelity of quantum gates. Here, we experimentally realize Abelian-geometric-phase-based nonadiabatic geometric one-qubit gates with a superconducting Xmon qubit. The realization is performed on two lowest levels of an Xmon qubit and thus avoids the influence from the short coherence time of the second excited state. The experimental result indicates that the average fidelities of single-qubit gates can be up to 99.6% and 99.7% characterized by quantum process tomography and randomized benchmarking, respectively.
Nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation has received increasing attention due to its robustness against control errors as well as high-speed realization. The original protocol ofnonadiabatic holonomic one-qubit gates has been experimentally demonstrated with superconducting transmon qutrit. However, the original protocol requires two noncommuting gates to realize an arbitrary one-qubit gate, which doubles the exposure time of gates to error sources and therefore makes the gates vulnerable to environment-induced decoherence. Single-shot protocol was subsequently proposed to realize an arbitrary one-qubit nonadiabatic holonomic gate. In this paper, we experimentally realize the single-shot protocol of nonadiabatic holonomic single qubit gates with a superconducting Xmon qutrit, where all the Clifford element gates are realized by a single-shot implementation. Characterized by quantum process tomography and randomized benchmarking, the single-shot gates reach a fidelity larger than 99%.
In a `shortcut-to-adiabaticity‘ (STA) protocol, the counter-diabatic Hamiltonian, which suppresses the non-adiabatic transition of a reference `adiabatic‘ trajectory, inducesa quantum uncertainty of the work cost in the framework of quantum thermodynamics. Following a theory derived recently [Funo et al 2017 Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 100602], we perform an experimental measurement of the STA work statistics in a high-quality superconducting Xmon qubit. Through the frozen-Hamiltonian and frozen-population techniques, we experimentally realize the two-point measurement of the work distribution for given initial eigenstates. Our experimental statistics verify (i) the conservation of the average STA work and (ii) the equality between the STA excess of work fluctuations and the quantum geometric tensor.