Quantum entanglement between an interfering particle and a detector for acquiring the which-path information plays a central role for enforcing Bohr’s complementary principle,but the quantitative relation between this entanglement and the fringe visibility remains untouched upon. Here we find an equality for quantifying this relation. Our equality characterizes how well the interference pattern can be preserved when an interfering particle, initially carrying a definite amount of coherence, is entangled with a which-path detector to a certain degree. This equality provides a connection between entanglement and interference in the unified framework of coherence, revealing the quantitative entanglement-interference complementarity for the first time. We experimentally demonstrate this relation with a superconducting circuit, where a resonator serves as a which-path detector for an interfering qubit. The results demonstrate quantum entanglement is the mechanism for prohibiting any detector from acquiring which-path information without deteriorating the interference pattern, which was not confirmed previously.
We propose a method for the dynamical control in three-level open systems and realize it in the experiment with a superconducting qutrit. Our work demonstrates that in the Markovianenvironment for a relatively long time (3 us), the systemic populations or coherence can still strictly follow the preset evolution paths. This is the first experiment for precisely controlling the Markovian dynamics of three-level open systems, providing a solid foundation for the future realization of dynamical control in multiple open systems. An instant application of the techniques demonstrated in this experiment is to stabilize the energy of quantum batteries.
Holonomies, arising from non-Abelian geometric transformations of quantum states in Hilbert space, offer a promising way for quantum computation. The non-community of these holonomiesrenders them suitable for realization of a universal set of quantum logic gates, while the global geometric feature may result in some noise-resilient advantages. Here we report on the first on-chip realization of the non-Abelian geometric controlled-Not gate, which is a buidling block for constructing a holonomic quantum computer. The conditional dynamics is achieved in an all-to-all connected architecture involving multiple frequency-tunable superconducting qubits controllably coupled to a resonator; a holonomic gate between any two qubits can be implemented by tuning their frequencies on resonance with the resonator and applying a two-tone drive to one of them. The combination of the present gate and previously demonstrated holonomic single-qubit operations represents an all-holonomic approach to scalable quantum computation on a superconducting platform.
Entanglement swapping allows two particles that have never been coupled directly or indirectly to be nonlocally correlated. Besides fundamental interest, this procedure has applicationsin complex entanglement manipulation and quantum communication. Entanglement swapping for qubits has been demonstrated in optical experiments, but where the process was conditional on detection of preset photon coincidence events, which succeeded with only a small probability. Here we report an unconditional entanglement swapping experiment with superconducting qubits. Using controllable qubit-qubit couplings mediated by a resonator, we prepare two highly entangled qubit pairs and then perform the Bell state measurement on two qubits coming from different entangled pairs, projecting the remaining two qubits to one of four Bell states. The measured concurrences for these Bell states are above 0.75,demonstrating the quantum nature of entanglement swapping. With this setup, we further demonstrate delayed-choice entanglement swapping, confirming whether two qubits behaved as in an entangled state or as in a separate state is determined by a later choice of the type of measurement on their partners. This is the first demonstration of entanglement-separability duality in a deterministic way, closing the detection loophole the previous experiments suffer from.
A central task towards building a practical quantum computer is to protect individual qubits from decoherence while retaining the ability to perform high-fidelity entangling gates involvingarbitrary two qubits. Here we propose and demonstrate a dephasing-insensitive procedure for storing and processing quantum information in an all-to-all connected superconducting circuit involving multiple frequency-tunable qubits, each of which can be controllably coupled to any other through a central bus resonator. Although it is generally believed that the extra frequency tunability enhances the control freedom but induces more dephasing impact for superconducting qubits, our results show that any individual qubit can be dynamically decoupled from dephasing noise by applying a weak continuous and resonant driving field whose phase is reversed in the middle of the pulse. More importantly, we demonstrate a new method for realizing two-qubit phase gate with inherent dynamical decoupling via the combination of continuous driving and qubit-qubit swapping coupling. We find that the weak continuous driving fields not only enable the conditional dynamics essential for quantum information processing, but also protect both qubits from dephasing during the gate operation.
In this paper, a method to accelerate population transfer by designing nonadiabatic evolution paths is proposed. We apply the method to realize robust and accelerated population transferwith a transmon qutrit. By numerical simulation, we show that this method allows a robust population transfer between the ground states in a Λ system. Moreover, the total pulse area for the population transfer is low as 1.9π that verifies the evolution is accelerated without increasing the pulse intensity. Therefore, the method is easily implementable based on the modern pulse shaper technology and it provides selectable schemes with interesting applications in quantum information processing.
Geometric phase, associated with holonomy transformation in quantum state space, is an important quantum-mechanical effect. Besides fundamental interest, this effect has practical applications,among which geometric quantum computation is a paradigm, where quantum logic operations are realized through geometric phase manipulation that has some intrinsic noise-resilient advantages and may enable simplified implementation of multiqubit gates compared to the dynamical approach. Here we report observation of a continuous-variable geometric phase and demonstrate a quantum gate protocol based on this phase in a superconducting circuit, where five qubits are controllably coupled to a resonator. Our geometric approach allows for one-step implementation of n-qubit controlled-phase gates, which represents a remarkable advantage compared to gate decomposition methods, where the number of required steps dramatically increases with n. Following this approach, we realize these gates with n up to 4, verifying the high efficiency of this geometric manipulation for quantum computation.
Here we report on the production and tomography of genuinely entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states with up to 10 qubits connecting to a bus resonator in a superconducting circuit,where the resonator-mediated qubit-qubit interactions are used to controllably entangle multiple qubits and to operate on different pairs of qubits in parallel. The resulting 10-qubit density matrix is unambiguously probed, with a fidelity of 0.668±0.025. Our results demonstrate the largest entanglement created so far in solid-state architectures, and pave the way to large-scale quantum computation.
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a two-fold quantum delayed-choice experiment where wave or particle nature of a superconducting interfering device can be post-selected twiceafter the interferometer. The wave-particle complementarity is controlled by a quantum which-path detector (WPD) in a superposition of its on and off states implemented through a superconducting cavity. The WPD projected to its on state records which-path information, which manifests the particle nature and destroys the interference associated with wave nature of the system. In our experiment, we can recover the interference signal through a quantum eraser even if the WPD has selected out the particle nature in the first round of delayed-choice detection, showing that a quantum WPD adds further unprecedented controllability to test of wave-particle complementarity through the peculiar quantum delayed-choice measurements.
Important tasks in cavity quantum electrodynamics include the generation and control of quantum states of spatially-separated particles distributed in different cavities. An interestingquestion in this context is how to prepare entanglement among particles located in different cavities, which are important for large-scale quantum information processing. We here consider a multi-cavity system where cavities are coupled to a superconducting (SC) qubit and each cavity hosts many SC qubits. We show that all intra-cavity SC qubits plus the coupler SC qubit can be prepared in an entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, by using a single operation and without the need of measurements. The GHZ state is created without exciting the cavity modes; thus greatly suppressing the decoherence caused by the cavity-photon decay and the effect of unwanted inter-cavity crosstalk on the operation. We also introduce two simple methods for entangling the intra-cavity SC qubits in a GHZ state. As an example, our numerical simulations show that it is feasible, with current circuit-QED technology, to prepare high-fidelity GHZ states, for up to nine SC qubits by using SC qubits distributed in two cavities. This proposal can in principle be used to implement a GHZ state for {\it an arbitrary number} of SC qubits distributed in multiple cavities. The proposal is quite general and can be applied to a wide range of physical systems, with the intra-cavity qubits being either atoms, NV centers, quantum dots, or various SC qubits.