arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to E. Knill.
The use of spin echoes to refocus one spin interactions (chemical shifts) and two spin interactions (spin-spin couplings) plays a central role in both conventional NMR experiments and NMR quantum computation. Here we describe schemes for efficient refocussing of such interactions in both fully and partially coupled spin systems.
Quantum mechanics provides spectacular new information processing abilities (Bennett 1995, Preskill 1998). One of the most unexpected is a procedure called quantum teleportation (Bennett et al 1993) that allows the quantum state of a system to be transported from one location to another, without moving through the intervening space. Partial implementations of teleportation (Bouwmeester et al 1997, Boschi et al 1998) over macroscopic distances have been achieved using optical systems, but omit the final stage of the teleportation procedure. Here we report an experimental implementation of the full quantum teleportation operation over inter-atomic distances using liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The inclusion of the final stage enables for the first time a teleportation implementation which may be used as a subroutine in larger quantum computations, or for quantum communication. Our experiment also demonstrates the use of quantum process tomography, a procedure to completely characterize the dynamics of a quantum system. Finally, we demonstrate a controlled exploitation of decoherence as a tool to assist in the performance of an experiment.
We show the equivalence of two different notions of quantum channel capacity: that which uses the entanglement fidelity as its criterion of success in transmission, and that which uses the minimum fidelity of pure states in a subspace of the input Hilbert space as its criterion. As a corollary, any source with entropy rate less than the capacity may be transmitted with high entanglement fidelity. We also show that a restricted class of encodings is sufficient to transmit any quantum source which may be transmitted on a given channel. This enables us to simplify a known upper bound for the channel capacity. It also enables us to show that the availability of an auxiliary classical channel from encoder to decoder does not increase the quantum capacity.
In standard quantum computation, the initial state is pure and the answer is determined by making a measurement of some of the bits in the computational basis. What can be accomplished if the initial state is a highly mixed state and the answer is determined by measuring the expectation of $σ_z$ on the first bit with bounded sensitivity? This is the situation in high temperature ensemble quantum computation. We show that in this model it is possible to perform interesting physics simulations which have no known efficient classical algorithms, even though the model is less powerful then standard quantum computing in the presence of oracles.
Quantum error correction is required to compensate for the fragility of the state of a quantum computer. We report the first experimental implementations of quantum error correction and confirm the expected state stabilization. In NMR computing, however, a net improvement in the signal-to-noise would require very high polarization. The experiment implemented the 3-bit code for phase errors in liquid state state NMR.
We describe the creation of a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state of the form |000>+|111> (three maximally entangled quantum bits) using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). We have successfully carried out the experiment using the proton and carbon spins of trichloroethylene, and confirmed the result using state tomography. We have thus extended the space of entangled quantum states explored systematically to three quantum bits, an essential step for quantum computation.
We have previously (quant-ph/9608012) shown that for quantum memories and quantum communication, a state can be transmitted over arbitrary distances with error $ε$ provided each gate has error at most $cε$. We discuss a similar concatenation technique which can be used with fault tolerant networks to achieve any desired accuracy when computing with classical initial states, provided a minimum gate accuracy can be achieved. The technique works under realistic assumptions on operational errors. These assumptions are more general than the stochastic error heuristic used in other work. Methods are proposed to account for leakage errors, a problem not previously recognized.
Does the notion of a quantum randomized or nondeterministic algorithm make sense, and if so, does quantum randomness or nondeterminism add power? Although reasonable quantum random sources do not add computational power, the discussion of quantum randomness naturally leads to several definitions of the complexity of quantum states. Unlike classical string complexity, both deterministic and nondeterministic quantum state complexities are interesting. A notion of \emph{total quantum nondeterminism} is introduced for decision problems. This notion may be a proper extension of classical nondeterminism.
Error operator bases for systems of any dimension are defined and natural generalizations of the bit/sign flip error basis for qubits are given. These bases allow generalizing the construction of quantum codes based on eigenspaces of Abelian groups. As a consequence, quantum codes can be constructed from linear codes over $\ints_n$ for any $n$. The generalization of the punctured code construction leads to many codes which permit transversal (i.e. fault tolerant) implementations of certain operations compatible with the error basis.
This report continues the discussion of unitary error bases and quantum codes begun in "Non-binary Unitary Error Bases and Quantum Codes". Nice error bases are characterized in terms of the existence of certain characters in a group. A general construction for error bases which are non-abelian over the center is given. The method for obtaining codes due to Calderbank et al. is generalized and expressed purely in representation theoretic terms. The significance of the inertia subgroup both for constructing codes and obtaining the set of transversally implementable operations is demonstrated.
In a recent preprint by Deutsch et al. [1995] the authors suggest the possibility of polynomial approximability of arbitrary unitary operations on $n$ qubits by 2-qubit unitary operations. We address that comment by proving strong lower bounds on the approximation capabilities of g-qubit unitary operations for fixed g. We consider approximation of unitary operations on subspaces as well as approximation of states and of density matrices by quantum circuits in several natural metrics. The ability of quantum circuits to probabilistically solve decision problem and guess checkable functions is discussed. We also address exact unitary representation by reducing the upper bound by a factor of n^2 and by formalizing the argument given by Barenco et al. [1995] for the lower bound. The overall conclusion is that almost all problems are hard to solve with quantum circuits.
It was recently shown that for reasonable notions of approximation of states and functions by quantum circuits, almost all states and functions are exponentially hard to approximate [Knill 1995]. The bounds obtained are asymptotically tight except for the one based on total variation distance (TVD). TVD is the most relevant metric for the performance of a quantum circuit. In this paper we obtain asymptotically tight bounds for TVD. We show that in a natural sense, almost all states are hard to approximate to within a TVD of 2/e-εeven for exponentially small ε. The quantity 2/e is asymptotically the average distance to the uniform distribution. Almost all states with probability amplitudes concentrated in a small fraction of the space are hard to approximate to within a TVD of 2-ε. These results imply that non-uniform quantum circuit complexity is non-trivial in any reasonable model. They also reinforce the notion that the relative information distance between states (which is based on the difficulty of transforming one state to another) fully reflects the dimensionality of the space of qubits, not the number of qubits.