arXiv subjects

Paola Cappellaro

Publications and source records attributed to Paola Cappellaro.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Telecom photon interface of solid-state quantum nodes

Solid-state spins such as nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center are promising platforms for large-scale quantum networks. Despite the optical interface of NV center system, however, the significant attenuation of its zero-phonon-line photon in optical fiber prevents the network extended to long distances. Therefore a telecom-wavelength photon interface would be essential to reduce the photon loss in transporting quantum information. Here we propose an efficient scheme for coupling telecom photon to NV center ensembles mediated by rare-earth doped crystal. Specifically, we proposed protocols for high fidelity quantum state transfer and entanglement generation with parameters within reach of current technologies. Such an interface would bring new insights into future implementations of long-range quantum network with NV centers in diamond acting as quantum nodes.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Emergent perturbation independent decay of the Loschmidt echo in a many-spin system studied through scaled dipolar dynamics

Evaluating the role of perturbations versus the intrinsic coherent dynamics in driving to equilibrium is of fundamental interest to understand quantum many-body thermalization, in the quest to build ever complex quantum devices. Here we introduce a protocol that scales down the coupling strength in a quantum simulator based on a solid-state nuclear spin system, leading to a longer decay time T2, while keeping perturbations associated to control error constant. We can monitor quantum information scrambling by measuring two powerful metrics, out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) and Loschmidt Echoes (LEs). While OTOCs reveal quantum information scrambling involving hundreds of spins, the LE decay quantifies, via the time scale T3, how well the scrambled information can be recovered through time reversal. We find that when the interactions dominate the perturbation, the LE decay rate only depends on the interactions themselves, T3 ~ T2, and not on the perturbation. Then, in an unbounded many-spin system, decoherence can achieve a perturbation-independent regime, with a rate only related to the local second moment of the Hamiltonian.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Comparing many-body localization lengths via non-perturbative construction of local integrals of motion

Many-body localization (MBL), characterized by the absence of thermalization and the violation of conventional thermodynamics, has elicited much interest both as a fundamental physical phenomenon and for practical applications in quantum information. A phenomenological model, which describes the system using a complete set of local integrals of motion (LIOMs), provides a powerful tool to understand MBL, but can be usually only computed approximately. Here we explicitly compute a complete set of LIOMs with a non-perturbative approach, by maximizing the overlap between LIOMs and physical spin operators in real space. The set of LIOMs satisfies the desired exponential decay of weight of LIOMs in real-space. This LIOM construction enables a direct mapping from the real space Hamiltonian to the phenomenological model and thus enables studying the localized Hamiltonian and the system dynamics. We can thus study and compare the localization lengths extracted from the LIOM weights, their interactions, and dephasing dynamics, revealing interesting aspects of many-body localization. Our scheme is immune to accidental resonances and can be applied even at phase transition point, providing a novel tool to study the microscopic features of the phenomenological model of MBL.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2018

Noise spectroscopy of a quantum-classical environment with a diamond qubit

Knowing a quantum system's environment is critical for its practical use as a quantum device. Qubit sensors can reconstruct the noise spectral density of a classical bath, provided long enough coherence time. Here we present a protocol that can unravel the characteristics of a more complex environment, comprising both unknown coherently coupled quantum systems, and a larger quantum bath that can be modeled as a classical stochastic field. We exploit the rich environment of a Nitrogen-Vacancy center in diamond, tuning the environment behavior with a bias magnetic field, to experimentally demonstrate our method. We show how to reconstruct the noise spectral density even when limited by relatively short coherence times, and identify the local spin environment. Importantly, we demonstrate that the reconstructed model can have predictive power, describing the spin qubit dynamics under control sequences not used for noise spectroscopy, a feature critical for building robust quantum devices. At lower bias fields, where the effects of the quantum nature of the bath are more pronounced, we find that more than a single classical noise model are needed to properly describe the spin coherence under different controls, due to the back action of the qubit onto the bath.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Emergent prethermalization signatures in out-of-time ordered correlations

How a many-body quantum system thermalizes --or fails to do so-- under its own interaction is a fundamental yet elusive concept. Here we demonstrate nuclear magnetic resonance observation of the emergence of prethermalization by measuring out-of-time ordered correlations. We exploit Hamiltonian engineering techniques to tune the strength of spin-spin interactions and of a transverse magnetic field in a spin chain system, as well as to invert the Hamiltonian sign to reveal out-of-time ordered correlations. At large fields, we observe an emergent conserved quantity due to prethermalization, which can be revealed by an early saturation of correlations. Our experiment not only demonstrates a new protocol to measure out-of-time ordered correlations, but also provides new insights in the study of quantum thermodynamics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Environment-assisted quantum-enhanced sensing with electronic spins in diamond

The performance of solid-state quantum sensors based on electronic spin defects is often limited by the presence of environmental spin impurities that cause decoherence. A promising approach to improve these quantum sensors is to convert environment spins into useful resources for sensing. Here we demonstrate the efficient use of an unknown electronic spin defect in the proximity of a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond as both a quantum sensor and a quantum memory. We first experimentally evaluate the improvement in magnetic field sensing provided by mixed entangled states of the two electronic spins. Our results critically highlight the tradeoff between the advantages expected from increasing the number of spin sensors and the typical challenges associated with increasing control errors, decoherence rates, and time overheads. Still, by taking advantage of the spin defect as both a quantum sensor and a quantum memory whose state can be repetitively measured to improve the readout fidelity, we can achieve a gain in performance over the use of a single-spin sensor. These results show that the efficient use of available quantum resources can enhance quantum devices, pointing to a practical strategy towards quantum-enhanced sensing and information processing by exploiting environment spin defects.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Ancilla-free quantum error correction codes for quantum metrology

Quantum error correction has recently emerged as a tool to enhance quantum sensing under Markovian noise. It works by correcting errors in a sensor while letting a signal imprint on the logical state. This approach typically requires a specialized error-correcting code, as most existing codes correct away both the dominant errors and the signal. To date, however, few such specialized codes are known, among which most require noiseless, controllable ancillas. We show here that such ancillas are not needed when the signal Hamiltonian and the error operators commute; a common limiting type of decoherence in quantum sensors. We give a semidefinite program for finding optimal ancilla-free sensing codes in general, as well as closed-form codes for two common sensing scenarios: qubits undergoing dephasing, and a lossy bosonic mode. Finally, we analyze the sensitivity enhancement offered by the qubit code under arbitrary spatial noise correlations, beyond the ideal limit of orthogonal signal and noise operators.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Quantum Hamiltonian Identifiability via a Similarity Transformation Approach and Beyond

The identifiability of a system is concerned with whether the unknown parameters in the system can be uniquely determined with all the possible data generated by a certain experimental setting. A test of quantum Hamiltonian identifiability is an important tool to save time and cost when exploring the identification capability of quantum probes and experimentally implementing quantum identification schemes. In this paper, we generalize the identifiability test based on the Similarity Transformation Approach (STA) in classical control theory and extend it to the domain of quantum Hamiltonian identification. We employ STA to prove the identifiability of spin-1/2 chain systems with arbitrary dimension assisted by single-qubit probes. We further extend the traditional STA method by proposing a Structure Preserving Transformation (SPT) method for non-minimal systems. We use the SPT method to introduce an indicator for the existence of economic quantum Hamiltonian identification algorithms, whose computational complexity directly depends on the number of unknown parameters (which could be much smaller than the system dimension). Finally, we give an example of such an economic Hamiltonian identification algorithm and perform simulations to demonstrate its effectiveness.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Spatial noise filtering through error correction for quantum sensing

Quantum systems can be used to measure various quantities in their environment with high precision. Often, however, their sensitivity is limited by the decohering effects of this same environment. Dynamical decoupling schemes are widely used to filter environmental noise from signals, but their performance is limited by the spectral properties of the signal and noise at hand. Quantum error correction schemes have therefore emerged as a complementary technique without the same limitations. To date, however, they have failed to correct the dominant noise type in many quantum sensors, which couples to each qubit in a sensor in the same way as the signal. Here we show how quantum error correction can correct for such noise, which dynamical decoupling can only partially address. Whereas dynamical decoupling exploits temporal noise correlations in signal and noise, our scheme exploits spatial correlations. We give explicit examples in small quantum devices and demonstrate a method by which error-correcting codes can be tailored to their noise.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Quantifying precision loss in local quantum thermometry via diagonal discord

When quantum information is spread over a system through nonclassical correlation, it makes retrieving information by local measurements difficult---making global measurement necessary for optimal parameter estimation. In this paper, we consider temperature estimation of a system in a Gibbs state and quantify the separation between the estimation performance of the global optimal measurement scheme and a greedy local measurement scheme by diagonal quantum discord. In a greedy local scheme, instead of global measurements, one performs sequential local measurement on subsystems, which is potentially enhanced by feed-forward communication. We show that, for finite-dimensional systems, diagonal discord quantifies the difference in the quantum Fisher information quantifying the precision limits for temperature estimation of these two schemes, and we analytically obtain the relation in the high-temperature limit. We further verify this result by employing the examples of spins with Heisenberg's interaction.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Protecting solid-state spins from strongly coupled environment

Quantum memories are critical for solid-state quantum computing devices and a good quantum memory requires both long storage time and fast read/write operations. A promising system is the Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) center in diamond, where the NV electronic spin serves as the computing qubit and a nearby nuclear spin as the memory qubit. Previous works used remote, weakly coupled $^{13}$C nuclear spins, trading read/write speed for long storage time. Here we focus instead on the intrinsic strongly coupled $^{14}$N nuclear spin. We first quantitatively understand its decoherence mechanism, identifying as its source the electronic spin that acts as a quantum fluctuator. We then propose a scheme to protect the quantum memory from the fluctuating noise by applying dynamical decoupling on the environment itself. We demonstrate a factor of $3$ enhancement of the storage time in a proof-of-principle experiment, showing the potential for a quantum memory that combines fast operation with long coherence time.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Measurement of transverse hyperfine interaction by forbidden transitions

Precise characterization of a system's Hamiltonian is crucial to its high-fidelity control that would enable many quantum technologies, ranging from quantum computation to communication and sensing. In particular, non-secular parts of the Hamiltonian are usually more difficult to characterize, even if they can give rise to subtle but non-negligible effects. Here we present a strategy for the precise estimation of the transverse hyperfine coupling between an electronic and a nuclear spin, exploiting effects due to forbidden transitions during the Rabi driving of the nuclear spin. We applied the method to precisely determine the transverse coupling between a Nitrogen-Vacancy center electronic spin and its Nitrogen nuclear spin. In addition, we show how this transverse hyperfine, that has been often neglected in experiments, is crucial to achieving large enhancements of the nuclear Rabi driving.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Exact dimension estimation of interacting qubit systems assisted by a single quantum probe

Estimating the dimension of an Hilbert space is an important component of quantum system identification. In quantum technologies, the dimension of a quantum system (or its corresponding accessible Hilbert space) is an important resource, as larger dimensions determine e.g. the performance of quantum computation protocols or the sensitivity of quantum sensors. Despite being a critical task in quantum system identification, estimating the Hilbert space dimension is experimentally challenging. While there have been proposals for various dimension witnesses capable of putting a lower bound on the dimension from measuring collective observables that encode correlations, in many practical scenarios, especially for multiqubit systems, the experimental control might not be able to engineer the required initialization, dynamics and observables. Here we propose a more practical strategy, that relies not on directly measuring an unknown multiqubit target system, but on the indirect interaction with a local quantum probe under the experimenter's control. Assuming only that the interaction model is given and the evolution correlates all the qubits with the probe, we combine a graph-theoretical approach and realization theory to demonstrate that the dimension of the Hilbert space can be exactly estimated from the model order of the system. We further analyze the robustness in the presence of background noise of the proposed estimation method based on realization theory, finding that despite stringent constrains on the allowed noise level, exact dimension estimation can still be achieved.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Selective decoupling and Hamiltonian engineering in dipolar spin networks

We present a protocol to selectively decouple, recouple, and engineer effective couplings in mesoscopic dipolar spin networks. In particular, we develop a versatile protocol that relies upon magic angle spinning to perform Hamiltonian engineering. By using global control fields in conjunction with a local actuator, such as a diamond Nitrogen Vacancy center located in the vicinity of a nuclear spin network, both global and local control over the effective couplings can be achieved. We show that the resulting effective Hamiltonian can be well understood within a simple, intuitive geometric picture, and corroborate its validity by performing exact numerical simulations in few-body systems. Applications of our method are in the emerging fields of two-dimensional room temperature quantum simulators in diamond platforms, as well as in dipolar coupled polar molecule networks.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Hamiltonian identifiability assisted by single-probe measurement

We study the Hamiltonian identifiability of a many-body spin-1/2 system assisted by the measure- ment on a single quantum probe based on the eigensystem realization algorithm (ERA) approach employed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 080401 (2014). We demonstrate a potential application of Gröbner basis to the identifiability test of the Hamiltonian, and provide the necessary experimental resources, such as the lower bound in the number of the required measurement points, the upper bound in total required evolution time, and thus the total measurement time. Focusing on the examples of the identifiability in the spin chain model with nearest-neighboring interaction, we classify the spin-chain Hamiltonian based on its identifiability, and provide the control protocols to engineer the nonidentifiable Hamiltonian to be an identifiable Hamiltonian.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Exploring Localization in Nuclear Spin Chains

Characterizing out-of-equilibrium many-body dynamics is a complex but crucial task for quantum applications and the understanding of fundamental phenomena. A central question is the role of localization in quenching quantum thermalization, and whether localization survives in the presence of interactions. The localized phase of interacting systems (many-body localization, MBL) exhibits a long-time logarithmic growth in entanglement entropy that distinguishes it from the noninteracting Anderson localization (AL), but entanglement is difficult to measure experimentally. Here, we present a novel correlation metric, capable of distinguishing MBL from AL in high-temperature spin systems. We demonstrate the use of this metric to detect localization in a natural solidstate spin system using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). We engineer the natural Hamiltonian to controllably introduce disorder and interactions and observe the emergence of localization. In particular, while our correlation metric saturates for AL, it keeps increasing logarithmically for MBL, a behavior reminiscent of entanglement entropy, as we confirm by simulations. Our results show that our NMR techniques, akin to measuring out-of-time correlations, are well suited for studying localization in spin systems.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2015

NMR Technique for Determining the Depth of Shallow Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in Diamond

We demonstrate a robust experimental method for determining the depth of individual shallow Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers in diamond with $\sim1$ nm uncertainty. We use a confocal microscope to observe single NV centers and detect the proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signal produced by objective immersion oil, which has well understood nuclear spin properties, on the diamond surface. We determine the NV center depth by analyzing the NV NMR data using a model that describes the interaction of a single NV center with the statistically-polarized proton spin bath. We repeat this procedure for a large number of individual, shallow NV centers and compare the resulting NV depths to the mean value expected from simulations of the ion implantation process used to create the NV centers, with reasonable agreement.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2014

Algebraic synthesis of time-optimal unitaries in SU(2) with alternating controls

We present an algebraic framework to study the time-optimal synthesis of arbitrary unitaries in SU(2), when the control set is restricted to rotations around two non-parallel axes in the Bloch sphere. Our method bypasses commonly used control-theoretical techniques, and easily imposes necessary conditions on time-optimal sequences. In a straightforward fashion, we prove that time-optimal sequences are solely parametrized by three rotation angles and derive general bounds on those angles as a function of the relative rotation speed of each control and the angle between the axes. Results are substantially different whether both clockwise and counterclockwise rotations about the given axes are allowed, or only clockwise rotations. In the first case, we prove that any finite time-optimal sequence is composed at most of five control concatenations, while for the more restrictive case, we present scaling laws on the maximum length of any finite time-optimal sequence. The bounds we find for both cases are stricter than previously published ones and severely constrain the structure of time-optimal sequences, allowing for an efficient numerical search of the time-optimal solution. Our results can be used to find the time-optimal evolution of qubit systems under the action of the considered control set, and thus potentially increase the number of realizable unitaries before decoherence.

quant-ph↗