arXiv subjects

Normann Mertig

Publications and source records attributed to Normann Mertig.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Pulse-optimised circuit elements for scalable and noise-resilient quantum chemistry

Useful chemistry calculations on near-term quantum processors are hindered by current algorithmic runtimes. We develop a methodology to significantly reduce these runtimes. Typically, variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms are implemented as sequences of primitive gates. Our methodology instead relies on gradient-ascent pulse engineering to construct hardware-tailored pulses for the direct implementation of VQEs. As problem sizes increase, it quickly becomes intractable to optimise a pulse that implements an entire VQE ansatz circuit. However, leading VQEs are constructed in a modular fashion. A problem-tailored VQE is assembled from parameterised circuit elements that simulate hopping between two or four electronic spin orbitals. We show that these circuit elements can be implemented more efficiently using hardware-tailored pulses. We numerically demonstrate our methodology on a silicon spin-qubit quantum processor. We find that common circuit elements, known as single- and double-qubit excitations, can be implemented in less than 289 ns and 927 ns, respectively. Compared with conventional gate-based implementations, our pulse-accelerated qubit excitations provide a scalable approach for faster and therefore more noise-robust quantum chemistry simulations by reducing VQE runtimes by up to a factor of 15.3.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Surface-Code Thresholds and Qubit Footprints in Shuttling-Based Spin-Qubit Railways

We present a fault-tolerant mapping of rotated surface codes onto a $2\times N$ silicon spin-qubit railway architecture, utilizing electron shuttling to resolve the wiring fan-out bottleneck. Employing circuit-level noise modeling, we evaluate threshold performances across various noise biases. We demonstrate that shuttling check qubits instead of data qubits fundamentally improves system thresholds. Crucially, under a noise model biased towards dephasing for spin-qubit shuttling, the non-CSS XZZX surface code outperforms standard CSS variants. By tailoring the topological code to this specific inherent bias, we show that the Megaquop footprint is achievable with a distance 7 code requiring a $p = 10^{-3}$ physical error rate, highlighting a pathway for substantial hardware reductions in early fault-tolerant quantum processors.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Valley enhanced Rabi frequency in n-type planar Silicon-MOS quantum dot

Electron spin resonance spectroscopy (ESR) of a single electron in planar Si-MOS quantum dot is reported in the vicinity of a valley level anti-crossing. A number of one and two-photon resonances are observed due to mixing of magnetic spin-flip and electric valley-flip transitions. This allows the reconstruction of the energy-level diagram of a four state system with two valley and two spin states. Near the anti-crossing, an enhancement of the Rabi frequency is observed. This is attributed to an electric-dipole transition activated by admixing of the upper energy level due to inter-valley spin coupling. The electric-dipole transition may be driven via capacitive coupling between the ESR antenna, and the confinement gate. To characterize spin-valley coupling responsible for the enhancement, we measure the anisotropy of the g-factor difference between the two valley states, the mean g-factor and the inter-valley spin coupling for both in and out-of-plane magnetic fields. The inter-valley spin coupling is strongly modulated by the direction of the B-field, and is strongest for out-of-plane B-field, consistent with an in-plane spin-valley field. In principle, this strong Electric dipole spin resonance (EDSR) effect could be utilized for fast all-electrical spin control in small-scale devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2026

Concatenated continuous driving of silicon qubit by amplitude and phase modulation

The rate of coherence loss is lower for a qubit under the Rabi drive than a freely evolving qubit $T_{2}^{\rm{Rabi}}>T_{2}^*$. Building on this principle, concatenated continuous driving (CCD) keeps the qubit under continuous drive to suppress noise and manipulate dressed states by either phase or amplitude modulation. In this work, we propose a variant of CCD which simultaneously modulates both the amplitude and phase of the driving field to generate a circularly polarized field in the rotating frame of the carrier frequency. This circular-modulated CCD(CMCCD) cancels the counter-rotating term in the second rotating frame, eliminating a systematic pulse-area error that arises from an imperfect rotating wave approximation for fast gates. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed CMCCD achieves higher gate fidelity than conventional CCD schemes. We further implement and compare different CCD protocols using an electron spin-qubit in an isotopically purified $^{28}$Si-MOS quantum dot and evaluate its robustness by applying static detuning and Rabi frequency errors. The robustness is significantly improved compared with the standard Rabi drive, showing the effectiveness of this scheme for qubit arrays with variation in qubit frequency, coupling to the Rabi drive, and low-frequency noise. The proposed scheme can be applied to various physical systems, including trapped atoms, cold atoms, superconducting qubits, and NV centers.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

High Fidelity Qubit Control in a Natural Si-MOS Quantum Dot using a 300 mm Silicon on Insulator Wafer

We demonstrate high-fidelity single qubit control in a natural Si-MOS quantum dot fabricated in an industrial 300 mm wafer process on a silicon on insulator (SOI) wafer using electron spin resonance. A relatively high optimal Rabi frequency of 5 MHz is achieved, dynamically decoupling the electron spin from its 29-Si environment. Tracking the qubit frequency reduces the impact of low frequency noise in the qubit frequency and improves the $T^{Rabi}$ from 7 to 11 $\mu$s at a Rabi frequency of 5 MHz, resulting in Q-factors exceeding 50. Randomized benchmarking returns an average single gate control fidelity of 99.5 $\pm$ 0.3%. As a result of pulse-area calibration, this fidelity is limited by the Rabi Q-factor. These results show that a fast Rabi frequency, low charge noise, and a feedback protocol enable high fidelity in these Si-MOS devices, despite the low-frequency magnetic noise.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2025

SpinHex: A low-crosstalk, spin-qubit architecture based on multi-electron couplers

Semiconductor spin qubits are an attractive quantum computing platform that offers long qubit coherence times and compatibility with existing semiconductor fabrication technology for scale up. Here, we propose a spin-qubit architecture based on spinless multielectron quantum dots that act as low-crosstalk couplers between a two-dimensional arrangement of spin-qubits in a hexagonal lattice. The multielectron couplers are controlled by voltage signals, which mediate fast Heisenberg exchange and thus enable coherent multi-qubit operations. For the proposed architecture, we discuss the implementation of the rotated XZZX surface code and numerically study its performance for a circuit-level noise model. We predict a threshold of $0.18\%$ for the error rate of the entangling gates. We further evaluate the scalability of the proposed architecture and predict the need for $4480$ physical qubits per logical qubit with logical error rates of $10^{-12}$ considering entangling gate fidelities of $99.99\%$, resulting in a chip size of $2.6$cm$^2$ to host $10,000$ logical qubits.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Robust spin-qubit control in a natural Si-MOS quantum dot using phase modulation

Silicon quantum dots are one of the most promising candidates for practical quantum computers because of their scalability and compatibility with the well-established complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. However, the coherence time is limited in industry-standard natural silicon because of the $^{29}$Si isotopes, which have non-zero nuclear spin. Here, we protect an isotopically natural silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor (Si-MOS) quantum dot spin qubit from environmental noise via electron spin resonance with a phase-modulated microwave (MW) drive. This concatenated continuous drive (CCD) method extends the decay time of Rabi oscillations from 1.2 $\mathrm{\mu s}$ to over 200 $\mathrm{\mu s}$. Furthermore, we define a protected qubit basis and propose robust gate operations. We find the coherence time measured by Ramsey sequence is improved from 143 ns to 40.7 $\mu$s compared to that of the bare spin qubit. The single qubit gate fidelity measured with randomized benchmarking is improved from 95% to 99%, underscoring the effectiveness of the CCD method. The method shows promise for improving control fidelity of noisy qubits, overcoming the qubit variability for global control, and maintaining qubit coherence while idling.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2024

Minimal evolution times for fast, pulse-based state preparation in silicon spin qubits

Standing as one of the most significant barriers to reaching quantum advantage, state-preparation fidelities on noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors suffer from quantum-gate errors, which accumulate over time. A potential remedy is pulse-based state preparation. We numerically investigate the minimal evolution times (METs) attainable by optimizing (microwave and exchange) pulses on silicon hardware. We investigate two state preparation tasks. First, we consider the preparation of molecular ground states and find the METs for H$_2$, HeH$^+$, and LiH to be 2.4 ns, 4.4 ns, and 27.2 ns, respectively. Second, we consider transitions between arbitrary states and find the METs for transitions between arbitrary four-qubit states to be below 50 ns. For comparison, connecting arbitrary two-qubit states via one- and two-qubit gates on the same silicon processor requires approximately 200 ns. This comparison indicates that pulse-based state preparation is likely to utilize the coherence times of silicon hardware more efficiently than gate-based state preparation. Finally, we quantify the effect of silicon device parameters on the MET. We show that increasing the maximal exchange amplitude from 10 MHz to 1 GHz accelerates the METs, e.g., for H$_2$ from 84.3 ns to 2.4 ns. This demonstrates the importance of fast exchange. We also show that increasing the maximal amplitude of the microwave drive from 884 kHz to 56.6 MHz shortens state transitions, e.g., for two-qubit states from 1000 ns to 25 ns. Our results bound both the state-preparation times for general quantum algorithms and the execution times of variational quantum algorithms with silicon spin qubits.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Quantifying the effect of gate errors on variational quantum eigensolvers for quantum chemistry

Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) are leading candidates to demonstrate near-term quantum advantage. Here, we conduct density-matrix simulations of leading gate-based VQEs for a range of molecules. We numerically quantify their level of tolerable depolarizing gate-errors. We find that: (i) The best-performing VQEs require gate-error probabilities between $10^{-6}$ and $10^{-4}$ ( $10^{-4}$ and $10^{-2}$ with error mitigation) to predict, within chemical accuracy, ground-state energies of small molecules with $4-14$ orbitals. (ii) ADAPT-VQEs that construct ansatz circuits iteratively outperform fixed-circuit VQEs. (iii) ADAPT-VQEs perform better with circuits constructed from gate-efficient rather than physically-motivated elements. (iv) The maximally-allowed gate-error probability, $p_c$, for any VQE to achieve chemical accuracy decreases with the number $\ncx$ of noisy two-qubit gates as $p_c\approxprop\ncx^{-1}$. Additionally, $p_c$ decreases with system size, even with error mitigation, implying that larger molecules require even lower gate-errors. Thus, quantum advantage via gate-based VQEs is unlikely unless gate-error probabilities are decreased by orders of magnitude.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Dynamic-ADAPT-QAOA: An algorithm with shallow and noise-resilient circuits

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is an appealing proposal to solve NP problems on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. Making NISQ implementations of the QAOA resilient to noise requires short ansatz circuits with as few CNOT gates as possible. Here, we present Dynamic-ADAPT-QAOA. Our algorithm significantly reduces the circuit depth and the CNOT count of standard ADAPT-QAOA, a leading proposal for near-term implementations of the QAOA. Throughout our algorithm, the decision to apply CNOT-intensive operations is made dynamically, based on algorithmic benefits. Using density-matrix simulations, we benchmark the noise resilience of ADAPT-QAOA and Dynamic-ADAPT-QAOA. We compute the gate-error probability $p_\text{gate}^\star$ below which these algorithms provide, on average, more accurate solutions than the classical, polynomial-time approximation algorithm by Goemans and Williamson. For small systems with $6-10$ qubits, we show that $p_{\text{gate}}^\star>10^{-3}$ for Dynamic-ADAPT-QAOA. Compared to standard ADAPT-QAOA, this constitutes an order-of-magnitude improvement in noise resilience. This improvement should make Dynamic-ADAPT-QAOA viable for implementations on superconducting NISQ hardware, even in the absence of error mitigation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Layering and subpool exploration for adaptive Variational Quantum Eigensolvers: Reducing circuit depth, runtime, and susceptibility to noise

Adaptive variational quantum eigensolvers (ADAPT-VQEs) are promising candidates for simulations of strongly correlated systems on near-term quantum hardware. To further improve the noise resilience of these algorithms, recent efforts have been directed towards compactifying, or layering, their ansatz circuits. Here, we broaden the understanding of the algorithmic layering process in three ways. First, we investigate the non-commutation relations between the different elements that are used to build ADAPT-VQE ans\"atze. Doing so, we develop a framework for studying and developing layering algorithms, which produce shallower circuits. Second, based on this framework, we develop a new subroutine that can reduce the number of quantum-processor calls by optimizing the selection procedure with which a variational quantum algorithm appends ansatz elements. Third, we provide a thorough numerical investigation of the noise-resilience improvement available via layering the circuits of ADAPT-VQE algorithms. We find that layering leads to an improved noise resilience with respect to amplitude-damping and dephasing noise, which, in general, affect idling and non-idling qubits alike. With respect to depolarizing noise, which tends to affect only actively manipulated qubits, we observe no advantage of layering.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Uniform hyperbolicity of a class of scattering maps

In recent years fractal Weyl laws and related quantum eigenfunction hypothesis have been studied in a plethora of numerical model systems, called quantum maps. In some models studied there one can easily prove uniform hyperbolicity. Yet, a numerically sound method for computing quantum resonance states, did not exist. To address this challenge, we recently introduced a new class of quantum maps. For these quantum maps, we showed that, quantum resonance states can numerically be computed using theoretically grounded methods such as complex scaling or weak absorbing potentials. However, proving uniform hyperbolicty for this class of quantum maps was not straight forward. Going beyond that work this article generalizes the class of scattering maps and provides mathematical proofs for their uniform hyperbolicity. In particular, we show that the suggested class of two-dimensional symplectic scattering maps satisfies the topological horseshoe condition and uniform hyperbolicity. In order to prove these properties, we follow the procedure developed in the paper by Devaney and Nitecki. Specifically, uniform hyperbolicity is shown by identifying a proper region in which the non-wandering set satisfies a sufficient condition to have the so-called sector bundle or cone field. Since no quantum map is known where both a proof of uniform hyperbolicity and a methodologically sound method for numerically computing quantum resonance states exist simultaneously, the present result should be valuable to further test fractal Weyl laws and related topics such as chaotic eigenfunction hypothesis.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2020

Minor-embedding heuristics for large-scale annealing processors with sparse hardware graphs of up to 102,400 nodes

Minor embedding heuristics have become an indispensable tool for compiling problems in quadratically unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) into the hardware graphs of quantum and CMOS annealing processors. While recent embedding heuristics have been developed for annealers of moderate size (about 2000 nodes) the size of the latest CMOS annealing processor (with 102,400 nodes) poses entirely new demands on the embedding heuristic. This raises the question, if recent embedding heuristics can maintain meaningful embedding performance on hardware graphs of increasing size. Here, we develop an improved version of the probabilistic-swap-shift-annealing (PSSA) embedding heuristic [which has recently been demonstrated to outperform the standard embedding heuristic by D-Wave Systems (Cai et al., 2014)] and evaluate its embedding performance on hardware graphs of increasing size. For random-cubic and Barabasi-Albert graphs we find the embedding performance of improved PSSA to consistently exceed the threshold of the best known complete graph embedding by a factor of 3.2 and 2.8, respectively, up to hardware graphs with 102,400 nodes. On the other hand, for random graphs with constant edge density not even improved PSSA can overcome the deterministic threshold guaranteed by the existence of the best known complete graph embedding. Finally, we prove a new upper bound on the maximal embeddable size of complete graphs into hardware graphs of CMOS annealers and show that the embedding performance of its currently best known complete graph embedding has optimal order for hardware graphs with fixed coordination number.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Resonance spectra for quantum maps of kicked scattering systems by complex scaling

We consider quantum maps induced by periodically-kicked scattering systems and discuss the computation of their resonance spectra in terms of complex scaling and sufficiently weak absorbing potentials. We also show that strong absorptive and projective openings, as commonly used for open quantum maps, fail to produce the resonance spectra of kicked scattering systems, even if the opening does not affect the classical trapped set. The results are illustrated for a concrete model system whose dynamics resembles key features of ionization and exhibits a trapped set which is organized by a topological horseshoe at large kick strength. Our findings should be useful for future tests of fractal Weyl conjectures and investigations of dynamical tunneling.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2016

Complex-Path Prediction of Resonance-Assisted Tunneling in Mixed Systems

We present a semiclassical prediction of regular-to-chaotic tunneling in systems with a mixed phase space, including the effect of a nonlinear resonance chain. We identify complex paths for direct and resonance-assisted tunneling in the phase space of an integrable approximation with one nonlinear resonance chain. We evaluate the resonance-assisted contribution analytically and give a prediction based on just a few properties of the classical phase space. For the standard map excellent agreement with numerically determined tunneling rates is observed. The results should similarly apply to ionization rates and quality factors.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2016

Perturbation-Free Prediction of Resonance-Assisted Tunneling in Mixed Regular--Chaotic Systems

For generic Hamiltonian systems we derive predictions for dynamical tunneling from regular to chaotic phase-space regions. In contrast to previous approaches, we account for the resonance-assisted enhancement of regular-to-chaotic tunneling in a non-perturbative way. This provides the foundation for future semiclassical complex-path evaluations of resonance-assisted regular-to-chaotic tunneling. Our approach is based on a new class of integrable approximations which mimic the regular phase-space region and its dominant nonlinear resonance chain in a mixed regular--chaotic system. We illustrate the method for the standard map.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2014

Integrable approximation of regular regions with a nonlinear resonance chain

Generic Hamiltonian systems have a mixed phase space where regions of regular and chaotic motion coexist. We present a method for constructing an integrable approximation to such regular phase-space regions including a nonlinear resonance chain. This approach generalizes the recently introduced iterative canonical transformation method. In the first step of the method a normal-form Hamiltonian with a resonance chain is adapted such that actions and frequencies match with those of the non-integrable system. In the second step a sequence of canonical transformations is applied to the integrable approximation to match the shape of regular tori. We demonstrate the method for the generic standard map at various parameters.

nlin.CD↗

arXiv2012

Complex paths for regular-to-chaotic tunneling rates

In generic Hamiltonian systems tori of regular motion are dynamically separated from regions of chaotic motion in phase space. Quantum mechanically these phase-space regions are coupled by dynamical tunneling. We introduce a semiclassical approach based on complex paths for the prediction of dynamical tunneling rates from regular tori to the chaotic region. This approach is demonstrated for the standard map giving excellent agreement with numerically determined tunneling rates.

nlin.CD↗