arXiv subjects

Leigh S. Martin

Publications and source records attributed to Leigh S. Martin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Nanoscale magnetometry via collective many-body dynamics in diamond

Many-body dynamics constitutes a promising approach for creating correlations between quantum particles which can be used for applications in sensing and metrology. However, utilizing this potential for substantial gains in practical settings is a challenging task with only a very few applications realized to date. Here, we demonstrate an approach to nanoscale magnetic sensing enabled by strongly interacting electronic spins in a room temperature solid. By coherently controlling collective many-body dynamics of a dipolar ensemble of $\sim 10^4$ nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres in diamond with pulsed magnetic field gradients, we demonstrate practical metrological gain up to $7.9(2)\,\mathrm{dB}$ for magnetic signal detection and $8.8(3)\,\mathrm{dB}$ for magnetic noise sensing, fully accounting for experimental overheads. Finally, we combine these methods to demonstrate a momentum-space-resolved sensing modality that enables detection of spatially correlated magnetic noise at continuously tunable length scales down to 50 nanometers. These observations open the door toward practical applications of interaction-enhanced quantum sensors for nanoscale biological imaging and material characterization.

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arXiv2025

Discovering novel quantum dynamics with NISQ simulators

Major technological advances of the past century are rooted in our understanding of quantum physics in the non-interacting limit. A central challenge today is to understand the behavior of complex quantum many-body systems, where interactions play an essential role. About four decades ago, Richard Feynman proposed using controllable quantum systems to efficiently simulate complex physics and chemistry problems, envisioning quantum orreries, highly tunable quantum devices built to emulate less understood quantum systems. Here we ask whether quantum simulators have already uncovered new physical phenomena-and, if so, in which areas and with what impact. We find that, in several notable instances, they have advanced our understanding of many-body quantum dynamics. Although many of these insights could in principle have been obtained theoretically or numerically, they were nevertheless first achieved using quantum processors. While a broad landscape of problems beyond non-equilibrium dynamics still awaits exploration, it is encouraging that quantum simulators are already beginning to challenge and refine our conventional wisdom.

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arXiv2025

Dressed-state Hamiltonian engineering in a strongly interacting solid-state spin ensemble

In quantum science applications, ranging from many-body physics to quantum metrology, dipolar interactions in spin ensembles are controlled via Floquet engineering. However, this technique typically reduces the interaction strength between spins, and effectively weakens the coupling to a target sensing field, limiting the metrological sensitivity. In this work, we develop and demonstrate a method for direct tuning of the native interaction in an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. Our approach utilizes dressed-state qubit encoding under a magnetic field perpendicular to the crystal lattice orientation. This method leads to a $3.2\times$ enhancement of the dimensionless coherence parameter $JT_2$ compared to state-of-the-art Floquet engineering, and a $2.6\times$ ($8.3~$dB) enhanced sensitivity in AC magnetometry. Utilizing the extended coherence we experimentally probe spin transport at intermediate to late times. Our results provide a powerful Hamiltonian engineering tool for future studies with NV ensembles and other interacting higher-spin ($S>\frac{1}{2}$) systems.

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arXiv2025

Collective many-body dynamics in a solid-state quantum sensor controlled through nanoscale magnetic gradients

Coherent collective dynamics of strongly interacting qubits are a central resource in quantum information science, with applications from quantum computing and simulation to metrology. While electronic spins interact strongly via dipolar couplings in dense solid-state ensembles, imperfections and positional disorder pose major obstacles to coherent correlated behavior, limiting their usefulness. Here, we realize collective many-body dynamics by combining time-dependent magnetic field gradients with global coherent control of dense electron spin ensembles in diamond. We control and probe the dynamics of nanometer-scale spin spirals, and, by exploiting Hamiltonian engineering that enhances the microscopic symmetry of the interactions, we observe a disorder-resilient collective spin evolution. Our results establish a pathway to interaction-enhanced quantum metrology and nanoscale imaging of materials and biological systems under ambient conditions.

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arXiv2025

Correlated Error Bursts in a Gap-Engineered Superconducting Qubit Array

One of the roadblocks towards the implementation of a fault-tolerant superconducting quantum processor is impacts of ionizing radiation with the qubit substrate. Such impacts temporarily elevate the density of quasiparticles (QPs) across the device, leading to correlated qubit error bursts. The most damaging errors, $T_1$ errors, stem from QP tunneling across the qubit Josephson junctions (JJs). Recently, we demonstrated that this type of error can be strongly suppressed by engineering the profile of superconducting gap at the JJs in a way that prevents QP tunneling. In this work, we identify a new type of impact-induced correlated error that persists in the presence of gap engineering. We observe that impacts shift the frequencies of the affected qubits, and thus lead to correlated phase errors. The frequency shifts are systematically negative, reach values up to $3\,{\rm MHz}$, and last for $\sim 1\,{\rm ms}$. We provide evidence that the shifts originate from QP-qubit interactions in the JJ region. Further, we demonstrate that the shift-induced phase errors can be detrimental to the performance of quantum error correction protocols.

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arXiv2025

Signal amplification in a solid-state quantum sensor via asymmetric time-reversal of many-body dynamics

Electronic spins of nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond constitute a promising system for micro- and nano-scale magnetic sensing, due to their operation under ambient conditions, ease of placement in close proximity to sensing targets, and biological compatibility. At high densities, the electronic spins interact through dipolar coupling, which typically limits but can also potentially enhance sensing performance. Here we report the experimental demonstration of many-body signal amplification in a solid-state, room temperature quantum sensor. Our approach utilizes time-reversed two-axis-twisting interactions, engineered through dynamical control of the quantization axis and Floquet engineering in a two-dimensional ensemble of NV centers. Strikingly, we observe that the optimal amplification occurs when the backward evolution time equals twice the forward evolution time, in sharp contrast to the conventional Loschmidt echo. These observations can be understood as resulting from an underlying time-reversed mirror symmetry of the microscopic dynamics, providing key insights into signal amplification and opening the door towards entanglement-enhanced practical quantum sensing.

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arXiv2023

A Multi-Qubit Quantum Gate Using the Zeno Effect

The Zeno effect, in which repeated observation freezes the dynamics of a quantum system, stands as an iconic oddity of quantum mechanics. When a measurement is unable to distinguish between states in a subspace, the dynamics within that subspace can be profoundly altered, leading to non-trivial behavior. Here we show that such a measurement can turn a non-interacting system with only single-qubit control into a two- or multi-qubit entangling gate, which we call a Zeno gate. The gate works by imparting a geometric phase on the system, conditioned on it lying within a particular nonlocal subspace. We derive simple closed-form expressions for the gate fidelity under a number of non-idealities and show that the gate is viable for implementation in circuit and cavity QED systems. More specifically, we illustrate the functioning of the gate via dispersive readout in both the Markovian and non-Markovian readout regimes, and derive conditions for longitudinal readout to ideally realize the gate.

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arXiv2023

Controlling local thermalization dynamics in a Floquet-engineered dipolar ensemble

Understanding the microscopic mechanisms of thermalization in closed quantum systems is among the key challenges in modern quantum many-body physics. We demonstrate a method to probe local thermalization in a large-scale many-body system by exploiting its inherent disorder, and use this to uncover the thermalization mechanisms in a three-dimensional, dipolar-interacting spin system with tunable interactions. Utilizing advanced Hamiltonian engineering techniques to explore a range of spin Hamiltonians, we observe a striking change in the characteristic shape and timescale of local correlation decay as we vary the engineered exchange anisotropy. We show that these observations originate from the system's intrinsic many-body dynamics and reveal the signatures of conservation laws within localized clusters of spins, which do not readily manifest using global probes. Our method provides an exquisite lens into the tunable nature of local thermalization dynamics, and enables detailed studies of scrambling, thermalization and hydrodynamics in strongly-interacting quantum systems.

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arXiv2023

Robust Hamiltonian Engineering for Interacting Qudit Systems

We develop a formalism for the robust dynamical decoupling and Hamiltonian engineering of strongly interacting qudit systems. Specifically, we present a geometric formalism that significantly simplifies qudit pulse sequence design, while incorporating the necessary robustness conditions. We experimentally demonstrate these techniques in a strongly-interacting, disordered ensemble of spin-1 nitrogen-vacancy centers, achieving over an order of magnitude improvement in coherence time over existing pulse sequences. We further describe how our techniques enable the engineering of exotic many-body phenomena such as quantum many-body scars, and allow enhanced sensitivities for quantum metrology. These results enable the engineering of a whole new class of complex qudit Hamiltonians, with wide-reaching applications in dynamical decoupling, many-body physics and quantum metrology.

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arXiv2023

Higher-Order Methods for Hamiltonian Engineering Pulse Sequence Design

We introduce a framework for designing Hamiltonian engineering pulse sequences that systematically accounts for the effects of higher-order contributions to the Floquet-Magnus expansion. Our techniques result in simple, intuitive decoupling rules, despite the higher-order contributions naively involving complicated, non-local-in-time commutators. We illustrate how these rules can be used to efficiently design improved Hamiltonian engineering pulse sequences for a wide variety of tasks, such as dynamical decoupling, quantum sensing, and quantum simulation.

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arXiv2023

Robust Higher-Order Hamiltonian Engineering for Quantum Sensing with Strongly Interacting Systems

Dynamical decoupling techniques constitute an integral part of many quantum sensing platforms, often leading to orders-of-magnitude improvements in coherence time and sensitivity. Most AC sensing sequences involve a periodic echo-like structure, in which the target signal is synchronized with the echo period. We show that for strongly interacting systems, this construction leads to a fundamental sensitivity limit associated with imperfect interaction decoupling. We present a simple physical picture demonstrating the origin of this limitation, and further formalize these considerations in terms of concise higher-order decoupling rules. We then show how these limitations can be surpassed by identifying a novel sequence building block, in which the signal period matches twice the echo period. Using these decoupling rules and the resulting sequence building block, we experimentally demonstrate significant improvements in dynamical decoupling timescales and magnetic field sensitivity, opening the door for new applications in quantum sensing and quantum many-body physics.

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arXiv2021

Demonstration of universal control between non-interacting qubits using the Quantum Zeno effect

The Zeno effect occurs in quantum systems when a very strong measurement is applied, which can alter the dynamics in non-trivial ways. Despite being dissipative, the dynamics stay coherent within any degenerate subspaces of the measurement. Here we show that such a measurement can turn a single-qubit operation into a two- or multi-qubit entangling gate, even in a non-interacting system. We demonstrate this gate between two effectively non-interacting transmon qubits. Our Zeno gate works by imparting a geometric phase on the system, conditioned on it lying within a particular non-local subspace. These results show how universality can be generated not only by coherent interactions as is typically employed in quantum information platforms, but also by Zeno measurements.

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arXiv2020

Quantum proportional-integral (PI) control

Feedback control is an essential component of many modern technologies and provides a key capability for emergent quantum technologies. We extend existing approaches of direct feedback control in which the controller applies a function directly proportional to the output signal (P feedback), to strategies in which feedback determined by an integrated output signal (I feedback), and to strategies in which feedback consists of a combination of P and I terms. The latter quantum PI feedback constitutes the analog of the widely used proportional-integral feedback of classical control. All of these strategies are experimentally feasible and require no complex state estimation. We apply the resulting formalism to two canonical quantum feedback control problems, namely, generation of an entangled state of two remote qubits, and stabilization of a harmonic oscillator under thermal noise under conditions of arbitrary measurement efficiency. These two problems allow analysis of the relative benefits of P, I, and PI feedback control. We find that for the two-qubit remote entanglement generation the best strategy can be a combined PI strategy when the measurement efficiency is less than one. In contrast, for harmonic state stabilization we find that P feedback shows the best performance when actuation of both position and momentum feedback is possible, while when only actuation of position is available, I feedback consistently shows the best performance, although feedback delay is shown to improve the performance of a P strategy here.

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arXiv2020

Continuous measurements for control of superconducting quantum circuits

Developments over the last two decades have opened the path towards quantum technologies in many quantum systems, such as cold atoms, trapped ions, cavity-quantum electrodynamics (QED), and circuit-QED. However the fragility of quantum states to the effects of measurement and decoherence still poses one of the greatest challenges in quantum technology. An imperative capability in this path is quantum feedback, as it enhances the control possibilities and allows for prolonging coherence times through quantum error correction. While changing parameters from shot to shot of an experiment or procedure can be considered feedback, quantum mechanics also allows for the intriguing possibility of performing feedback operations during the measurement process itself. This broader approach to measurements leads to the concepts of weak measurement, quantum trajectories and numerous types of feedback with no classical analogues. These types of processes are the primary focus of this review. We introduce the concept of quantum feedback in the context of circuit QED, an experimental platform with significant potential in quantum feedback and technology. We then discuss several experiments and see how they elucidate the concepts of continuous measurements and feedback. We conclude with an overview of coherent feedback, with application to fault-tolerant error correction.

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arXiv2020

Quantum feedback for measurement and control

The standard quantum formalism introduced at the undergraduate level treats measurement as an instantaneous collapse. In reality however, no physical process can occur over a truly infinitesimal time interval. A more subtle investigation of open quantum systems lead to the theory of continuous measurement and quantum trajectories, in which wave function collapse occurs over a finite time scale associated with an interaction. Within this formalism, it becomes possible to ask many new questions that would be trivial or even ill-defined in the context of the more basic measurement model. In this thesis, we investigate both theoretically and experimentally what fundamentally new capabilities arise when an experimental apparatus can resolve the continuous dynamics of a measurement. Theoretically, we show that when one can perform feedback operations on the timescale of the measurement process, the resulting tools provide significantly more control over entanglement generation, and in some settings can generate it optimally. We derive these results using a novel formalism which encompasses most known quantum feedback protocols. Experimentally, we show that continuous measurement allows one to observe the dynamics of a system undergoing simultaneous non-commuting measurements, which provides a reinterpretation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Finally, we combine the theoretical focus on quantum feedback with the experimental capabilities of superconducting circuits to implement a feedback controlled quantum amplifier. The resulting system is capable of adaptive measurement, which we use to perform the first canonical phase measurement.

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arXiv2019

Single-shot deterministic entanglement between non-interacting systems with linear optics

Measurement-based heralded entanglement schemes have served as the primary link between physically separated qubits in most quantum information platforms. However, the impossibility of performing a deterministic Bell measurement with linear optics bounds the success rate of the standard protocols to at most 50%, which means that the entanglement of the unheralded state is zero. Here we show that the ability to perform feedback during the measurement process enables unit success probability in a single shot. Our primary feedback protocol, based on photon counting retains the same robustness as the standard Barrett-Kok scheme, while doubling the success probability even in the presence of loss. In superconducting circuits, for which homodyne detectors are more readily available than photon counters, we give another protocol that can deterministically entangle remote qubits given existing parameters. In constructing the latter protocol, we derive a general expression for locally optimal control that applies to any continuous, measurement-based feedback problem.

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arXiv2019

Implementation of a canonical phase measurement with quantum feedback

Much of modern metrology and communication technology encodes information in electromagnetic waves, typically as an amplitude or phase. While current hardware can perform near-ideal measurements of photon number or field amplitude, to date no device exists that can even in principle perform an ideal phase measurement. In this work, we implement a single-shot canonical phase measurement on a one-photon wave packet, which surpasses the current standard of heterodyne detection and is optimal for single-shot phase estimation. By applying quantum feedback to a Josephson parametric amplifier, our system adaptively changes its measurement basis during photon arrival and allows us to validate the detector's performance by tracking the quantum state of the photon source. These results provide an important capability for optical quantum computing, and demonstrate that quantum feedback can both enhance the precision of a detector and enable it to measure new classes of physical observables.

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arXiv2018

Using a Recurrent Neural Network to Reconstruct Quantum Dynamics of a Superconducting Qubit from Physical Observations

At its core, Quantum Mechanics is a theory developed to describe fundamental observations in the spectroscopy of solids and gases. Despite these practical roots, however, quantum theory is infamous for being highly counterintuitive, largely due to its intrinsically probabilistic nature. Neural networks have recently emerged as a powerful tool that can extract non-trivial correlations in vast datasets. They routinely outperform state-of-the-art techniques in language translation, medical diagnosis and image recognition. It remains to be seen if neural networks can be trained to predict stochastic quantum evolution without a priori specifying the rules of quantum theory. Here, we demonstrate that a recurrent neural network can be trained in real time to infer the individual quantum trajectories associated with the evolution of a superconducting qubit under unitary evolution, decoherence and continuous measurement from raw observations only. The network extracts the system Hamiltonian, measurement operators and physical parameters. It is also able to perform tomography of an unknown initial state without any prior calibration. This method has potential to greatly simplify and enhance tasks in quantum systems such as noise characterization, parameter estimation, feedback and optimization of quantum control.

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