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Daniel Burgarth

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Burgarth.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2019

Robust controllability of two-qubit Hamiltonian dynamics

Quantum gates (unitary gates) on physical systems are usually implemented by controlling the Hamiltonian dynamics. When full descriptions of the Hamiltonians parameters is available, the set of implementable quantum gates is easily characterised by quantum control theory. In many real systems, however, the Hamiltonians may include unknown parameters due to the difficulty of precise measurements or instability of the system. In this paper, we consider the situation that some parameters of the Hamiltonian are unknown, but we still want to perform a robust control of a quantum gate irrespectively to the unknown parameters. The existence of such control was previously shown in single-qubit systems, and a constructive method was developed for two-qubit systems provided full single-qubit controls are available. We analytically investigate the robust controllability of two-qubit systems, and apply Lie algebraic approaches to handle the cases where only controlling one of the two qubits is allowed. We also use numerical approaches for these problems since our analytical approaches does not work in some systems.

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arXiv2019

Generalized Product Formulas and Quantum Control

We study the quantum evolution under the combined action of the exponentials of two not necessarily commuting operators. We consider the limit in which the two evolutions alternate at infinite frequency. This case appears in a plethora of situations, both in physics (Feynman integral) and mathematics (product formulas). We focus on the case in which the two evolution times are scaled differently in the limit and generalize standard techniques and results.

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arXiv2019

Generalized Adiabatic Theorem and Strong-Coupling Limits

We generalize Kato's adiabatic theorem to nonunitary dynamics with an isospectral generator. This enables us to unify two strong-coupling limits: one driven by fast oscillations under a Hamiltonian, and the other driven by strong damping under a Lindbladian. We discuss the case where both mechanisms are present and provide nonperturbative error bounds. We also analyze the links with the quantum Zeno effect and dynamics.

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arXiv2018

In situ upgrade of quantum simulators to universal computers

Quantum simulators, machines that can replicate the dynamics of quantum systems, are being built as useful devices and are seen as a stepping stone to universal quantum computers. A key difference between the two is that computers have the ability to perform the logic gates that make up algorithms. We propose a method for learning how to construct these gates efficiently by using the simulator to perform optimal control on itself. This bypasses two major problems of purely classical approaches to the control problem: the need to have an accurate model of the system, and a classical computer more powerful than the quantum one to carry out the required simulations. Strong evidence that the scheme scales polynomially in the number of qubits, for systems of up to 9 qubits with Ising interactions, is presented from numerical simulations carried out in different topologies. This suggests that this in situ approach is a practical way of upgrading quantum simulators to computers.

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arXiv2017

The roles of drift and control field constraints upon quantum control speed limits

In this work we derive a lower bound for the minimum time required to implement a target unitary transformation through a classical time-dependent field in a closed quantum system. The bound depends on the target gate, the strength of the internal Hamiltonian and the highest permitted control field amplitude. These findings reveal some properties of the reachable set of operations, explicitly analyzed for a single qubit. Moreover, for fully controllable systems, we identify a lower bound for the time at which all unitary gates become reachable. We use numerical gate optimization in order to study the tightness of the obtained bounds. It is shown that in the single qubit case our analytical findings describe the relationship between the highest control field amplitude and the minimum evolution time remarkably well. Finally, we discuss both challenges and ways forward for obtaining tighter bounds for higher dimensional systems, offering a discussion about the mathematical form and the physical meaning of the bound.

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arXiv2017

Driven quantum dynamics: will it blend?

Randomness is an essential tool in many disciplines of modern sciences, such as cryptography, black hole physics, random matrix theory and Monte Carlo sampling. In quantum systems, random operations can be obtained via random circuits thanks to so-called q-designs, and play a central role in the fast scrambling conjecture for black holes. Here we consider a more physically motivated way of generating random evolutions by exploiting the many-body dynamics of a quantum system driven with stochastic external pulses. We combine techniques from quantum control, open quantum systems and exactly solvable models (via the Bethe-Ansatz) to generate Haar-uniform random operations in driven many-body systems. We show that any fully controllable system converges to a unitary q-design in the long-time limit. Moreover, we study the convergence time of a driven spin chain by mapping its random evolution into a semigroup with an integrable Liouvillean and finding its gap. Remarkably, we find via Bethe-Ansatz techniques that the gap is independent of q. We use mean-field techniques to argue that this property may be typical for other controllable systems, although we explicitly construct counter-examples via symmetry breaking arguments to show that this is not always the case. Our findings open up new physical methods to transform classical randomness into quantum randomness, via a combination of quantum many-body dynamics and random driving.

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arXiv2017

Positive Hamiltonians can give purely exponential decay

It is commonly claimed that only Hamiltonians with a spectrum unbounded both above and below can give purely exponential decay. Because such Hamiltonians have no ground state, they are considered unphysical. Here we show that Hamiltonians which are bounded below can give purely exponential decay. This is possible when, instead of looking at the global survival probability, one considers a subsystem only. We conclude that purely exponential decay might not be as unphysical as previously thought.

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arXiv2017

Evolution-free Hamiltonian parameter estimation through Zeeman markers

We provide a protocol for Hamiltonian parameter estimation which relies only on the Zeeman effect. No time-dependent quantities need to be measured, it fully suffices to observe spectral shifts induced by fields applied to local `markers'. We demonstrate the idea with a simple tight-binding Hamiltonian and numerically show stability with respect to Gaussian noise on the spectral measurements. Then we generalize the result to show applicability to a wide range of systems, including quantum spin chains, networks of qubits, and coupled harmonic oscillators, and suggest potential experimental implementations.

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arXiv2017

Dynamical Decoupling of Unbounded Hamiltonians

We investigate the possibility to suppress interactions between a finite dimensional system and an infinite dimensional environment through a fast sequence of unitary kicks on the finite dimensional system. This method, called dynamical decoupling, is known to work for bounded interactions, but physical environments such as bosonic heat baths are usually modelled with unbounded interactions, whence here we initiate a systematic study of dynamical decoupling for unbounded operators. We develop a sufficient decoupling criterion for arbitrary Hamiltonians and a necessary decoupling criterion for semibounded Hamiltonians. We give examples for unbounded Hamiltonians where decoupling works and the limiting evolution as well as the convergence speed can be explicitly computed. We show that decoupling does not always work for unbounded interactions and provide both physically and mathematically motivated examples.

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arXiv2017

Dynamical Decoupling and Homogenization of continuous variable systems

For finite-dimensional quantum systems, such as qubits, a well established strategy to protect such systems from decoherence is dynamical decoupling. However many promising quantum devices, such as oscillators, are infinite dimensional, for which the question if dynamical decoupling could be applied remained open. Here we first show that not every infinite-dimensional system can be protected from decoherence through dynamical decoupling. Then we develop dynamical decoupling for continuous variable systems which are described by quadratic Hamiltonians. We identify a condition and a set of operations that allow us to map a set of interacting harmonic oscillators onto a set of non-interacting oscillators rotating with an averaged frequency, a procedure we call homogenization. Furthermore we show that every quadratic system-environment interaction can be suppressed with two simple operations acting only on the system. Using a random dynamical decoupling or homogenization scheme, we develop bounds that characterize how fast we have to work in order to achieve the desired uncoupled dynamics. This allows us to identify how well homogenization can be achieved and decoherence can be suppressed in continuous variable systems.

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arXiv2017

Remote Parameter Estimation in a Quantum Spin Chain Enhanced by Local Control

We study the interplay of control and parameter estimation on a quantum spin chain. A single qubit probe is attached to one end of the chain, while we wish to estimate a parameter on the other end. We find that control on the probe qubit can substantially improve the estimation performance and discover some interesting connections to quantum state transfer.

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arXiv2017

Lindbladian purification

In a recent work [D. K. Burgarth et al., Nat. Commun. 5, 5173 (2014)] it was shown that a series of frequent measurements can project the dynamics of a quantum system onto a subspace in which the dynamics can be more complex. In this subspace even full controllability can be achieved, although the controllability over the system before the projection is very poor since the control Hamiltonians commute with each other. We can also think of the opposite: any Hamiltonians of a quantum system, which are in general noncommutative with each other, can be made commutative by embedding them in an extended Hilbert space, and thus the dynamics in the extended space becomes trivial and simple. This idea of making noncommutative Hamiltonians commutative is called "Hamiltonian purification." The original noncommutative Hamiltonians are recovered by projecting the system back onto the original Hilbert space through frequent measurements. Here we generalize this idea to open-system dynamics by presenting a simple construction to make Lindbladians, as well as Hamiltonians, commutative on a larger space with an auxiliary system. We show that the original dynamics can be recovered through frequently measuring the auxiliary system in a non-selective way. Moreover, we provide a universal pair of Lindbladians which describes an "accessible" open quantum system for generic system sizes. This allows us to conclude that through a series of frequent non-selective measurements a nonaccessible open quantum system generally becomes accessible. This sheds further light on the role of measurement backaction on the control of quantum systems.

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arXiv2017

Gateway schemes of quantum control for spin networks

Towards the full-fledged quantum computing, what do we need? Obviously, the first thing we need is a (many-body) quantum system, which is reasonably isolated from its environment in order to reduce the unwanted effect of noise, and the second might be a good technique to fully control it. Although we would also need a well-designed quantum code for information processing for fault-tolerant computation, from a physical point of view, the primary requisites are a system and a full control for it. Designing and fabricating a controllable quantum system is a hard work in the first place, however, we shall focus on the subsequent steps that cannot be skipped and are highly nontrivial.

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arXiv2016

Isotropy and control of dissipative quantum dynamics

We investigate the problem of what evolutions an open quantum system described by a time-local Master equation can undergo with universal coherent controls. A series of conditions are given which exclude channels from being reachable by any unitary controls, assuming that the coupling to the environment is not being modified. These conditions primarily arise by defining decay rates for the generator of the dynamics of the open system, and then showing that controlling the system can only make these rates more isotropic. This forms a series of constraints on the shape and non-unitality of allowed evolutions, as well as an expression for the time required to reach a given goal. We give numerical examples of the usefulness of these criteria, and explore some similarities they have with quantum thermodynamics.

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arXiv2016

Universal Control Induced by Noise

On the basis of the quantum Zeno effect it has been recently shown [D. K. Burgarth et al., Nat. Commun. 5, 5173 (2014)] that a strong amplitude damping process applied locally on a part of a quantum system can have a beneficial effect on the dynamics of the remaining part of the system. Quantum operations that cannot be implemented without the dissipation become achievable by the action of the strong dissipative process. Here we generalize this idea by identifying decoherence-free subspaces (DFS's) as the subspaces in which the dynamics becomes more complex. Applying methods from quantum control theory we characterize the set of reachable operations within the DFS's. We provide three examples which become fully controllable within the DFS's while the control over the original Hilbert space in the absence of dissipation is trivial. In particular, we show that the (classical) Ising Hamiltonian is turned into a Heisenberg Hamiltonian by strong collective decoherence, which provides universal quantum computation within the DFS's. Moreover we perform numerical gate optimization to study how the process fidelity scales with the noise strength. As a byproduct a subsystem fidelity which can be applied in other optimization problems for open quantum systems is developed.

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arXiv2015

Quantum Estimation via Sequential Measurements

The problem of estimating a parameter of a quantum system through a series of measurements performed sequentially on a quantum probe is analyzed in the general setting where the underlying statistics is explicitly non-i.i.d. We present a generalization of the central limit theorem in the present context, which under fairly general assumptions shows that as the number $N$ of measurement data increases the probability distribution of functionals of the data (e.g., the average of the data) through which the target parameter is estimated becomes asymptotically normal and independent of the initial state of the probe. At variance with the previous studies [M. Guţă, Phys. Rev. A 83, 062324 (2011); M. van Horssen and M. Guţă, J. Math. Phys. 56, 022109 (2015)] we take a diagrammatic approach, which allows one to compute not only the leading orders in $N$ of the moments of the average of the data but also those of the correlations among subsequent measurement outcomes. In particular our analysis points out that the latter, which are not available in usual i.i.d. data, can be exploited in order to improve the accuracy of the parameter estimation. An explicit application of our scheme is discussed by studying how the temperature of a thermal reservoir can be estimated via sequential measurements on a quantum probe in contact with the reservoir.

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arXiv2015

Quantum Resource Control for noisy EPR-steering with qubit measurements

We demonstrate how quantum optimal control can be used to enhance quantum resources for bipartite one-way protocols, specifically EPR-steering with qubit measurements. Steering is relevant for one-sided device-independent key distribution, the realistic implementations of which necessitate the study of noisy scenarios. So far mainly the case of imperfect detection efficiency has been considered; here we look at the effect of dynamical noise responsible for decoherence and dissipation. In order to set up the optimisation, we map the steering problem into the equivalent joint measurability problem, and employ quantum resource-theoretic robustness monotones from that context. The advantage is that incompatibility (hence steerability) with arbitrary pairs of noisy qubit measurements has been completely characterised through an analytical expression, which can be turned into a computable cost function with exact gradient. Furthermore, dynamical loss of incompatibility has recently been illustrated using these monotones. We demonstrate resource control numerically using a special gradient-based software, showing, in particular, the advantage over naive control with cost function chosen as a fidelity in relation to a specific target. We subsequently illustrate the complexity of the control landscapes with a simplified two-variable scheme. The results contribute to the theoretical understanding of the limitations in realistic implementations of quantum information protocols, also paving way to practical use of the rather abstract quantum resource theories.

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