arXiv subjects

Robert E. Throckmorton

Publications and source records attributed to Robert E. Throckmorton.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

A generalized model of the noise spectrum of a two-level fluctuator in the presence of an electron subbath

The work of Ahn derives the noise power spectrum of a two-level fluctuator (TLF) in the case that it interacts only with a subregion of a full electron bath and thus is subject to a fluctuating temperature. However, Eq.~(1), which gives the variance of the subbath temperature in terms of the heat capacity, in that work carries the implicit assumption that the heat capacity of this subbath may be taken to be a constant, which is a good approximation at higher temperatures, but breaks down at lower temperatures. We thus extend this work to the case in which the fact that the electronic heat capacity of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) $C_V\propto T$, rather than constant in temperature, is fully taken into account. We show that, at low temperatures, the resulting power spectrum of the noise $S(ω)\propto e^{-C/T^{3/8}}$, in contrast to $S(ω)\propto e^{-C'/T^{1/3}}$ as found previously, where $C$ and $C'$ are constants. We also compare the numerical results that one would obtain from the two models and find that our results for $S(ω)$ can differ from those of Ahn by several orders of magnitude at low temperatures.

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arXiv2022

Effects of leakage on the realization of a discrete time crystal in a chain of singlet-triplet qubits

We consider the effects of leakage on the ability to realize a discrete time crystal (DTC) in a semiconductor quantum dot linear array being operated as a chain of singlet-triplet (ST) qubits. This system realizes an Ising model with an effective applied magnetic field, plus additional terms that can cause leakage out of the computational subspace. We demonstrate that, in the absence of these leakage terms, this model theoretically realizes a DTC phase over a broad parameter regime for six and eight qubits, with a broader parameter range for the eight-qubit case. We then reintroduce the leakage terms and find that the DTC phase disappears entirely over the same parameter range if the system is only subject to a uniform magnetic field, which does not suppress leakage. However, we find that the DTC phase can be restored if the system is instead subject to a magnetic field that alternates from qubit to qubit, which suppresses leakage. We thus show that leakage is a serious problem for the realization of a DTC phase in a chain of ST qubits, but is by no means insurmountable. Our work suggests that experiments manifesting small-system stable DTC should be feasible with currently existing quantum dot spin qubits.

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arXiv2022

Crosstalk- and charge-noise-induced multiqubit decoherence in exchange-coupled quantum dot spin qubit arrays

We determine the interqubit crosstalk- and charge-noise-induced decoherence time $T_2^\ast$ for a system of $L$ exchange-coupled electronic spin qubits in arrays of size $L=3$--$14$ for a number of different multiqubit geometries by directly calculating the return probability. We compare the behavior of the return probability to other quantities, namely, the average spin, the Hamming distance, and the entanglement entropy. In all cases, we use a starting state with alternating spins, $\left |Ψ_0\right >=\left |\downarrow\uparrow\downarrow\cdots\right >$. We show that a power law behavior, $T_2^\ast\propto L^{-γ}$, is a good fit to the results for the chain and ring geometries as a function of the number of qubits, and provide numerical results for the exponent $γ$. We find that $T_2^\ast$ depends crucially on the multiqubit geometry of the system. We also calculate the expectation value of one of the spins, the Hamming distance, and the entanglement entropy and show that they are good proxies for the return probability for measuring $T_2^\ast$. A key finding is that $T_2^\ast$ decreases with increasing $L$. We also demonstrate that these results may be understood in terms of perturbation theory and its breakdown.

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arXiv2022

Dissipation and gate timing errors in SWAP operations of qubits

We examine how dissipation and gate timing errors affect the fidelity of a sequence of SWAP gates on a chain of interacting qubits in comparison to noise in the interqubit interaction. Although interqubit interaction noise and gate timing errors are always present in any qubit platform, dissipation is a special case that can arise in multivalley semiconductor spin qubit systems, such as Si-based qubits, where dissipation may be used as a general model for valley leakage. In our Hamiltonian, each qubit is coupled via Heisenberg exchange to every other qubit in the chain, with the strength of the exchange interaction decreasing exponentially with distance between the qubits. Dissipation is modeled through the term $-iγ\mathbf{1}$ in the Hamiltonian, and $γ$ is chosen so as to be consistent with the experimentally observed intervalley tunneling in Si. We show that randomness in the dissipation parameter should have little to no effect on the SWAP gate fidelity in the currently fabricated Si circuits. We introduce quasistatic noise in the interqubit interaction and random gate timing error and average the fidelities over 10,000 realizations for each set of parameters. The fidelities are then plotted against $J_\text{SWAP}$, the strength of the exchange coupling corresponding to the SWAP gate. We find that dissipation decreases the fidelity of the SWAP operation -- though the effect is small compared to that of the known noise in the interqubit interaction -- and that gate timing error creates an effective optimal value of $J_\text{SWAP}$, beyond which infidelity begins to increase.

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arXiv2021

Studying many-body localization in exchange-coupled electron spin qubits using spin-spin correlations

We show that many-body localization (MBL) effects can be observed in a finite chain of exchange-coupled spin qubits in the presence of both exchange and magnetic noise, a system that has been experimentally realized in semiconductors and is a potential solid-state quantum computing platform. In addition to established measures of MBL, the level spacing ratio and the entanglement entropy, we propose another quantity, the spin-spin correlation function, that can be measured experimentally and is particularly well-suited to experiments in semiconductor-based electron spin qubit systems. We show that, in cases that the established measures detect as delocalized "phases", the spin-spin correlation functions retain no memory of the system's initial state (i.e., the long-time value deviates significantly from the initial value), but that they do retain memory in cases that the established measures detect as localized "phases". We also discover an interesting counterintuitive result that there is no clear tendency towards localization with increasing charge noise in small systems ($3$--$10$ spins). The proposed experiments should be feasible in the existing semiconductor spin qubit systems.

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arXiv2020

Fidelity of a sequence of SWAP operations on a spin chain

We consider the ``transport'' of the state of a spin across a Heisenberg-coupled spin chain via the use of repeated SWAP gates, starting with one of two states---one in which the leftmost spin is down and the others up, and one in which the leftmost two spins are in a singlet state (i.e., they are entangled), and the others are again all up. More specifically, we ``transport'' the state of the leftmost spin in the first case and the next-to-leftmost spin in the second to the other end of the chain, and then back again. We accomplish our SWAP operations here by increasing the exchange coupling between the two spins that we operate on from a base value $J$ to a larger value $J_\text{SWAP}$ for a time $t=π\hbar/4J_\text{SWAP}$. We determine the fidelity of this sequence of operations in a number of situations---one in which only nearest-neighbor coupling exists between spins and there is no magnetic dipole-dipole coupling or noise (the most ideal case), one in which we introduce next-nearest-neighbor coupling, but none of the other effects, and one in which all of these effects are present. In the last case, the noise is assumed to be quasistatic, i.e., the exchange couplings are each drawn from a Gaussian distribution, truncated to only nonnegative values. We plot the fidelity as a function of $J_\text{SWAP}$ to illustrate various effects, namely crosstalk due to coupling to other spins, as well as noise, that are detrimental to our ability to perform a SWAP operation. Our theory should be useful to the ongoing experimental efforts in building semiconductor-based spin quantum computer architectures.

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arXiv2020

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in a honeycomb lattice subject to a periodic potential

Motivated by recent developments in twisted bilayer graphene moiré superlattices, we investigate the effects of electron-electron interactions in a honeycomb lattice with an applied periodic potential using a finite-temperature Wilson-Fisher momentum shell renormalization group (RG) approach. We start with a low-energy effective theory for such a system, at first giving a discussion of the most general case in which no point group symmetry is preserved by the applied potential, and then focusing on the special case in which the potential preserves a $D_3$ point group symmetry. As in similar studies of bilayer graphene, we find that, while the coupling constants describing the interactions diverge at or below a certain "critical temperature" $T=T_c$, it turns out that ratios of these constants remain finite and in fact provide information about what types of orders the system is becoming unstable to. However, in contrast to these previous studies, we only find isolated fixed rays, indicating that these orders are likely unstable to perturbations to the coupling constants. Our RG analysis leads to the qualitative conclusion that the emergent interaction-induced symmetry-breaking phases in this model system, and perhaps therefore by extension in twisted bilayer graphene, are generically unstable and fragile, and may thus manifest strong sample dependence.

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arXiv2019

Simulation of Coupling Strength of Capacitively Coupled Singlet-Triplet Qubits

We consider a system of two purely capacitively-coupled singlet-triplet qubits, and numerically simulate the energy structure of four electrons in two double quantum dots with a large potential barrier between them. We calculate the interqubit coupling strength using an extended Hund-Mulliken approach which includes excited orbitals in addition to the lowest energy orbital for each quantum dot. We show the coupling strength as a function of the qubit separation, as well as plotting it against the detunings of the two double quantum dots, and show that the general qualitative features of our results can be captured by a potential-independent toy model of the system.

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arXiv2019

Conditions allowing error correction in driven qubits

We consider a qubit that is driven along its logical $z$ axis, with noise along the $z$ axis in the driving field $Ω$ proportional to some function $f(Ω)$, as well as noise along the logical $x$ axis. We establish that whether or not errors due to both types of noise can be canceled out, even approximately, depends on the explicit functional form of $f(Ω)$ by considering a power-law form, $f(Ω)\proptoΩ^k$. In particular, we show that such cancellation is impossible for $k=0$, $1$, or any even integer. However, any other odd integer value of $k$ besides $1$ does permit cancellation; in fact, we show that both types of errors can be corrected with a sequence of four square pulses of equal duration. We provide sets of parameters that correct for errors for various rotations and evaluate the error, measured by the infidelity, for the corrected rotations versus the naïve rotations, i.e., the operations that, in the complete absence of noise, would produce the desired rotations (in this case a single pulse of appropriate duration and magnitude). We also consider a train of four trapezoidal pulses, which take into account the fact that there will be, in real experimental systems, a finite rise time, again providing parameters for error-corrected rotations that employ such pulse sequences. Our dynamical decoupling error correction scheme works for any qubit platform as long as the errors are quasistatic.

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arXiv2018

Plasmon-pole approximation for many-body-effects in extrinsic graphene

We develop the plasmon-pole approximation (PPA) theory for calculating the carrier self-energy of extrinsic graphene as a function of doping density within analytical approximations to the $GW$ random phase approximation ($GW$-RPA). Our calculated self-energy shows excellent quantitative agreement with the corresponding full $GW$-RPA calculation results in spite of the simplicity of the PPA, establishing the general validity of the plasmon-pole approximation scheme. We also provide a comparison between the PPA and the hydrodynamic approximation in graphene, and comment on the experimental implications of our findings.

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arXiv2018

Failure of Kohn's theorem and the apparent failure of the $f$-sum rule in intrinsic Dirac-Weyl materials in the presence of a filled Fermi sea

Kohn's theorem and the $f$-sum rule are powerful theorems, the first applying to translationally invariant single-band electronic systems with parabolic electronic dispersion relations and the second applying to materials in general, that impose restrictions on the effects of electron-electron interactions on electrical conductivity and on dielectric response, respectively. We show rigorously that Kohn's theorem does not hold for intrinsic Dirac-Weyl materials with filled Fermi seas where the chemical potential is pinned at the band touching points. We also demonstrate that the low-energy effective "relativistic" theories used in many-body studies of these materials violate the $f$-sum rule due to the neglect of the full band structure of the materials in the effective low-energy relativistic approximations.

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arXiv2018

Error correction for gate operations in systems of exchange-coupled singlet-triplet qubits in double quantum dots

We present a scheme for correcting for crosstalk- and noise-induced errors in exchange-coupled singlet-triplet semiconductor double quantum dot qubits. While exchange coupling allows the coupling strength to be controlled independently of the intraqubit exchange couplings, there is also the problem of leakage, which must be addressed. We show that, if a large magnetic field difference is present between the two qubits, leakage is suppressed. We then develop pulse sequences that correct for crosstalk- and noise-induced errors and present parameters describing them for the 24 Clifford gates. We determine the infidelity for both the uncorrected and corrected gates as a function of the error-inducing terms and show that our corrected pulse sequences reduce the error by several orders of magnitude.

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arXiv2018

Crosstalk error correction through dynamical decoupling of single-qubit gates in capacitively coupled singlet-triplet semiconductor spin qubits

In addition to magnetic field and electric charge noise adversely affecting spin qubit operations, performing single-qubit gates on one of multiple coupled singlet-triplet qubits presents a new challenge---crosstalk, which is inevitable (and must be minimized) in any multiqubit quantum computing architecture. We develop a set of dynamically-corrected pulse sequences that are designed to cancel the effects of both types of noise (i.e., field and charge) as well as crosstalk to leading order, and provide parameters for these corrected sequences for all 24 of the single-qubit Clifford gates. We then provide an estimate of the error as a function of the noise and capacitive coupling to compare the fidelity of our corrected gates to their uncorrected versions. Dynamical error correction protocols presented in the current work are important for the next generation of singlet-triplet qubit devices where coupling among many qubits will become relevant.

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arXiv2017

Fast pulse sequences for dynamically corrected gates in single-triplet qubits

We present a set of experimentally feasible pulse sequences that implement any single-qubit gate on a singlet-triplet spin qubit and demonstrate that these new sequences are up to three times faster than existing sequences in the literature. We show that these sequences can be extended to incorporate built-in dynamical error correction, yielding gates that are robust to both charge and magnetic field noise and up to twice as fast as previous dynamically corrected gate schemes. We present a thorough comparison of the performance of our new sequences with that of several existing ones using randomized benchmarking, considering both quasistatic and $1/f^α$ noise models. We provide our results both as a function of evolution time and as a function of the number of gates, which respectively yield both an effective coherence time and an estimate of the number of gates that can be performed within this coherence time. We determine which set of pulse sequences gives the best results for a wide range of noise strengths and power spectra. Overall, we find that the traditional, slower sequences perform best when there is no field noise or when the noise contains significant high-frequency components; otherwise, our new, fast sequences exhibit the best performance.

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arXiv2017

Randomized benchmarking of barrier versus tilt control of a singlet-triplet qubit

Decoherence due to charge noise is one of the central challenges in using spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots as a platform for quantum information processing. Recently, it has been experimentally demonstrated in both Si and GaAs singlet-triplet qubits that the effects of charge noise can be suppressed if qubit operations are implemented using symmetric barrier control instead of the standard tilt control. Here, we investigate the key issue of whether the benefits of barrier control persist over the entire set of single-qubit gates by performing randomized benchmarking simulations. We find the surprising result that the improvement afforded by barrier control depends sensitively on the amount of spin noise: for the minimal nuclear spin noise levels present in Si, the coherence time improves by more than two orders of magnitude whereas in GaAs, by contrast the coherence time is essentially the same for barrier and tilt control. However, we establish that barrier control becomes beneficial if qubit operations are performed using a new family of composite pulses that reduce gate times by up to 90%. With these optimized pulses, barrier control is the best way to achieve high-fidelity quantum gates in singlet-triplet qubits.

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arXiv2017

Environmental noise effects on entanglement fidelity of exchange-coupled semiconductor spin qubits

We investigate the effect of magnetic field and charge noise on the generation of entanglement between two Heisenberg exchange-coupled electron spins in a double quantum dot. We focus on exchange-driven evolution that would ideally take an initial unentangled tensor product state to a maximally-entangled state in the absence of noise. The presence of noise obviously adversely affects the attainment of maximal entanglement, which we study quantitatively and exactly. To quantify the effects of noise, we calculate two-qubit coherence times and entanglement fidelity, both of which can be extracted from simulations or measurements of the return probability as a function of interaction time, i.e., the time period during which the exchange coupling remains effective between the two spins. We perform these calculations for a broad range of noise strengths that includes the regime of recent experiments. We find that the two types of noise reduce the amount of entanglement in qualitatively distinct ways and that, although charge noise generally leads to faster decoherence, the relative importance of the two types of noise in entanglement creation depends sensitively on the strength of the exchange coupling. Our results can be used to determine the level of noise suppression needed to reach quantum error correction thresholds. We provide quantitative guidance for the requisite noise constraints necessary to eventually reach the $>99\%$ fidelity consistent with the quantum error correction threshold.

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arXiv2016

Dynamics of two coupled semiconductor spin qubits in a noisy environment

We theoretically consider the temporal dynamics of two coupled spin qubits (e.g., semiconductor quantum dots) driven by the inter-qubit spin-spin coupling. The presence of environmental noise (e.g., charge traps, nuclear spins, random magnetic impurities) is accounted for by including random magnetic field and random inter-qubit coupling terms in the Hamiltonian. Both Heisenberg coupling and Ising coupling between the spin qubits are considered, corresponding respectively to exchange and capacitive gates as appropriate for single spin and singlet-triplet semiconductor qubit systems, respectively. Both exchange (Heisenberg) and capacitive (Ising) coupling situations can be solved numerically exactly even in the presence of noise, leading to the key findings that (i) the steady-state return probability to the initial state remains close to unity in the presence of strong noise for many, but not all, starting spin configurations, and (ii) the return probability as a function of time is oscillatory with a characteristic noise-controlled decay toward the steady-state value. We also provide results for the magnetization dynamics of the coupled two-qubit system. Our predicted dynamics can be directly tested in the already existing semiconductor spin qubit setups providing insight into their coherent interaction dynamics. Retention of the initial state spin memory even in the presence of strong environmental noise has important implications for quantum computation using spin qubits.

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arXiv2016

Noise-induced collective quantum state preservation in spin qubit arrays

The hyperfine interaction with nuclear spins (or, Overhauser noise) has long been viewed as a leading source of decoherence in individual quantum dot spin qubits. Here we show that in a coupled multi-qubit system consisting of as few as four spins, interactions with nuclear spins can have the opposite effect where they instead preserve the collective quantum state of the system. This noise-induced state preservation can be realized in a linear spin qubit array using current technological capabilities. Our proposal requires no control over the Overhauser fields in the array; only experimental control over the average interqubit coupling between nearest neighbors is needed, and this is readily achieved by tuning gate voltages. Our results illustrate how the role of the environment can transform from harmful to helpful in the progression from single-qubit to multi-qubit quantum systems.

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