arXiv subjects

T. E. O'Brien

Publications and source records attributed to T. E. O'Brien.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Restless Tuneup of High-Fidelity Qubit Gates

We present a tuneup protocol for qubit gates with tenfold speedup over traditional methods reliant on qubit initialization by energy relaxation. This speedup is achieved by constructing a cost function for Nelder-Mead optimization from real-time correlation of non-demolition measurements interleaving gate operations without pause. Applying the protocol on a transmon qubit achieves 0.999 average Clifford fidelity in one minute, as independently verified using randomized benchmarking and gate set tomography. The adjustable sensitivity of the cost function allows detecting fractional changes in gate error with nearly constant signal-to-noise ratio. The restless concept demonstrated can be readily extended to the tuneup of two-qubit gates and measurement operations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Explicit construction of local conserved operators in disordered many-body systems

The presence and character of local integrals of motion -- quasi-local operators that commute with the Hamiltonian -- encode valuable information about the dynamics of a quantum system. In particular, strongly disordered many-body systems can generically avoid thermalisation when there are extensively many such operators. In this work, we explicitly construct local conserved operators in $1$D spin chains by directly minimising their commutator with the Hamiltonian. We demonstrate the existence of an extensively large set of local integrals of motion in the many-body localised phase of the disordered XXZ spin chain. These operators are shown to have exponentially decaying tails, in contrast to the ergodic phase where the decay is (at best) polynomial in the size of the subsystem. We study the algebraic properties of localised operators, and confirm that in the many-body localised phase they are well-described by "dressed" spin operators.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2016

Active resonator reset in the nonlinear dispersive regime of circuit QED

We present two pulse schemes for actively depleting measurement photons from a readout resonator in the nonlinear dispersive regime of circuit QED. One method uses digital feedback conditioned on the measurement outcome while the other is unconditional. In the absence of analytic forms and symmetries to exploit in this nonlinear regime, the depletion pulses are numerically optimized using the Powell method. We shorten the photon depletion time by more than six inverse resonator linewidths compared to passive depletion by waiting. We quantify the benefit by emulating an ancilla qubit performing repeated quantum parity checks in a repetition code. Fast depletion increases the mean number of cycles to a spurious error detection event from order 1 to 75 at a 1 microsecond cycle time.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Magnetic breakdown and Klein tunneling in a type-II Weyl semimetal

The band structure of a type-II Weyl semimetal has pairs of electron and hole pockets that coexist over a range of energies and touch at a topologically protected conical point. We identify signatures of this Weyl point in the magnetic quantum oscillations of the density of states, observable in thermodynamic properties. Tunneling between the electron and hole pockets in a magnetic field is the momentum space counterpart of Klein tunneling at a p-n junction in real space. This magnetic breakdown happens at a characteristic field that vanishes when the Fermi level approaches the Weyl point. Topologically distinct, connected or disconnected, pairs of type-II Weyl cones can be distinguished by the qualitatively different dependence of the quantum oscillations on the direction of the magnetic field.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2015

A many-body interpretation of Majorana bound states, and conditions for their localisation

We derive a condition for the existence of completely or exponentially localised Majorana bound states (with the potential for non-Abelian statistics) in a generic many-body system. We discuss the relationship between the existence of these operators and the protection of the ground state degeneracy from local perturbations. We use our methods to study the exponential decay of the Majorana bound states in the non-interacting Kitaev chain, finding complete agreement between our many-body calculation and single-particle results. We then apply these results to various interacting systems which have previous evidence for Majorana bound states.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2011

Universal geometric classification of armchair graphene nanoribbons by their properties in a staggered sublattice potential

We demonstrate the topological properties of the band-gap of armchair graphene nanoribbons in a spatially varying staggered sublattice potential. Several general scaling laws are presented to quantify the band gap variation. It is found that all armchair nanoribbons are described by one of three distinct classes depending on their width, one of which is the well known massless Dirac condition, and the other two we call potentially gapless, and gapless-superlattice. We construct an effective theory which faithfully reproduces these results, and makes explicit the nature of the competing masses and overlap integrals across a particular sample. Finally we propose several systems on which these results should shed considerable light, and which have all already been experimentally realized.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗