arXiv subjects

Todd A. Brun

Publications and source records attributed to Todd A. Brun.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Fault-tolerant Preparation of Stabilizer States for Quantum CSS Codes by Classical Error-Correcting Codes

Stabilizer states are extensively studied in quantum information theory for their structures based on the Pauli group. Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) stabilizer states are of particular importance in their application to fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC). However, how to fault-tolerantly prepare arbitrary CSS stabilizer states for general CSS stabilizer codes is still unknown, and their preparation can be highly costly in computational resources. In this paper, we show how to prepare a large class of CSS stabilizer states useful for FTQC. We propose distillation protocols using syndrome encoding by classical codes or quantum CSS codes. Along the same lines, we show that classical coding techniques can reduce the ancilla consumption in Steane syndrome extraction by using additional transversal controlled-NOT gates and classical computing power. In the scenario of a fixed ancilla consumption rate, we can increase the frequency of quantum error correction and effectively lower the error rate.

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arXiv2017

Simulations of closed timelike curves

Proposed models of closed timelike curves (CTCs) have been shown to enable powerful information-processing protocols. We examine the simulation of models of CTCs both by other models of CTCs and by physical systems without access to CTCs. We prove that the recently proposed transition probability CTCs (T-CTCs) are physically equivalent to postselection CTCs (P-CTCs), in the sense that one model can simulate the other with reasonable overhead. As a consequence, their information-processing capabilities are equivalent. We also describe a method for quantum computers to simulate Deutschian CTCs (but with a reasonable overhead only in some cases). In cases for which the overhead is reasonable, it might be possible to perform the simulation in a table-top experiment. This approach has the benefit of resolving some ambiguities associated with the equivalent circuit model of Ralph et al. Furthermore, we provide an explicit form for the state of the CTC system such that it is a maximum-entropy state, as prescribed by Deutsch.

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arXiv2016

Protecting weak measurements against systematic errors

In this work, we consider the systematic error of quantum metrology by weak measurements under decoherence. We derive the systematic error of maximum likelihood estimation in general to the first-order approximation of a small deviation in the probability distribution, and study the robustness of standard weak measurement and postselected weak measurements against systematic errors. We show that, with a large weak value, the systematic error of a postselected weak measurement when the probe undergoes decoherence can be significantly lower than that of a standard weak measurement. This indicates the advantage of weak value amplification in improving the performance of parameter estimation. We illustrate the results by an exact numerical simulation of decoherence arising from a bosonic mode and compare it to the first-order analytical result we obtain.

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arXiv2016

Quantum metrology for a general Hamiltonian parameter

Quantum metrology enhances the sensitivity of parameter estimation using the distinctive resources of quantum mechanics such as entanglement. It has been shown that the precision of estimating an overall multiplicative factor of a Hamiltonian can be increased to exceed the classical limit, yet little is known about estimating a general Hamiltonian parameter. In this paper, we study this problem in detail. We find that the scaling of the estimation precision with the number of systems can always be optimized to the Heisenberg limit, while the time scaling can be quite different from that of estimating an overall multiplicative factor. We derive the generator of local parameter translation on the unitary evolution operator of the Hamiltonian, and use it to evaluate the estimation precision of the parameter and establish a general upper bound on the quantum Fisher information. The results indicate that the quantum Fisher information generally can be divided into two parts: one is quadratic in time, while the other oscillates with time. When the eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian do not depend on the parameter, the quadratic term vanishes, and the quantum Fisher information will be bounded in this case. To illustrate the results, we give an example of estimating a parameter of a magnetic field by measuring a spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particle, and compare the results for estimating the amplitude and the direction of the magnetic field.

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arXiv2016

Method for quantum-jump continuous-time quantum error correction

Continuous-time quantum error correction (CTQEC) is a technique for protecting quantum information against decoherence, where both the decoherence and error correction processes are considered continuous in time. Given any [[n,k,d]] quantum stabilizer code, we formulate a class of protocols to implement CTQEC, involving weak coherent measurements and weak unitary corrections. Under this formalism, we show that the minimal required size of the ancillary system is n-k+1 qubits, and we propose one scheme that meets this minimal requirement. Furthermore, we compare our method with other known schemes, and show that a particular measure of performance described in this paper is better when using our method.

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arXiv2015

Decoherence by Internal Degrees of Freedom

We consider a composite system consisting of coupled particles, and investigate decoherence due to coupling of the center-of-mass degree of freedom with the internal degrees of freedom. For a simple model of two bound particles, we show that in general such a decoherence effect exists, and leads to suppression of interference between different paths of the center-of-mass. For the special case of two harmonically-bound particles moving in an external potential in one dimension, we show that the coupling between the center-of-mass and internal degrees of freedom can be approximated as parametric driving, and that nontrivial coupling depends on the second derivative of the external potential. We find a partial solution to this parametric driving problem. For a simple interference experiment, consisting of two wave packets scattering off of a square well, we perform numerical simulations and show a close connection between suppression of interference and entanglement between the center-of-mass and internal degrees of freedom. We also propose a measure of compositeness which quantifies the extent to which a composite system cannot be approximated as a single, indivisible particle. We numerically calculate this quantity for our square well example system.

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arXiv2015

Improving the precision of weak measurements by postselection measurement

Postselected weak measurement is a useful protocol for amplifying weak physical effects. However, there has recently been controversy over whether it gives any advantage in precision. While it is now clear that retaining failed postselections can yield more Fisher information than discarding them, the advantage of postselection measurement itself still remains to be clarified. In this Letter, we address this problem by studying two widely used estimation strategies: averaging measurement results, and maximum likelihood estimation, respectively. For the first strategy, we find a surprising result that squeezed coherent states of the pointer can give postselected weak measurements a higher signal-to-noise ratio than standard ones while all standard coherent states cannot, which suggests that raising the precision of weak measurements by postselection calls for the presence of "nonclassicality" in the pointer states. For the second strategy, we show that the quantum Fisher information of postselected weak measurements is generally larger than that of standard weak measurements, even without using the failed postselection events, but the gap can be closed with a proper choice of system state.

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arXiv2015

Suppressing technical noises in weak measurement by entanglement

Postselected weak measurement has aroused broad interest for its distinctive ability to amplify small physical quantities. However, the low postselection efficiency to obtain a large weak value has been a big obstacle to its application in practice, since it may waste resources, and reduce the measurement precision. An improved protocol was proposed in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 030401 (2014)] to make the postselected weak measurement dramatically more efficient by using entanglement. Such a protocol can increase the Fisher information of the measurement to approximately saturate the well-known Heisenberg limit. In this paper, we review the entanglement-assisted protocol of postselected weak measurement in detail, and study its robustness against technical noises. We focus on readout errors. Readout errors can greatly degrade the performance of postselected weak measurement, especially when the readout error probability is comparable to the postselection probability. We show that entanglement can significantly reduce the two main detrimental effects of readout errors: inaccuracy in the measurement result, and the loss of Fisher information. We extend the protocol by introducing a majority vote scheme to postselection to further compensate for readout errors. With a proper threshold, almost no Fisher information will be lost. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of entanglement in protecting postselected weak measurement against readout errors.

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arXiv2015

Compatibility of state assignments and pooling of information

We say that two (or more) state assignments for one and the same quantum system are compatible if they could represent the assignments of observers with differing information about the system. A criterion for compatibility was proposed in [Phys. Rev. A 65, 032315 (2002)]; however, this leaves unanswered the question of whether there are degrees of compatibility which could be represented by some quantitative measure, and whether there is a straightforward procedure whereby the observers can pool their information to arrive at a unique joint state assignment. We argue that such measures are only sensible given some assumption about what kind of information was used in making the state assignments in the first place, and that in general state assignments do not represent all of the information possessed by the observers. However, we examine one particular measure, and show that it has a straightforward interpretation, assuming that the information was acquired from a particular type of measurement, and that in this case there is a natural rule for pooling information. We extend this measure to compatibility of states for k observers, and show that the value is the solution to a semidefinite program. Similar compatibility measures can be defined for alternative notions of state compatibility, including Post-Peierls (PP) and Equal Support (ES) compatibility.

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arXiv2015

Teleportation-based Fault-tolerant Quantum Computation in Multi-qubit Large Block Codes

A major goal for fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) is to reduce the overhead needed for error correction. One approach is to use block codes that encode multiple qubits, which can achieve significantly higher rates for the same code distance than single-qubit code blocks or topological codes. We present a scheme for universal quantum computation using multi-qubit Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) block codes, where codes admitting different transversal gates are used to achieve universality, and logical teleportation is used to move qubits between code blocks. All circuits for both computation and error correction are transversal. We also argue that single shot fault-tolerant error correction can be done in Steane syndrome extraction. Then, we present estimates of information lifetime for a few possible codes, which suggests that highly nontrivial quantum computations can be achieved at reasonable error rates, using codes that require significantly less than 100 physical qubits per logical qubit.

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arXiv2015

Continuous decomposition of quantum measurements via Hamiltonian feedback

We characterize the set of generalized quantum measurements that can be decomposed into a continuous measurement process using a stream of probe qubits and a tunable interaction Hamilto- nian. Each probe in the stream interacts weakly with the target quantum system, then is measured projectively in a standard basis. This measurement result is used in a closed feedback loop to tune the interaction Hamiltonian for the next probe. The resulting evolution is a stochastic process with the structure of a one-dimensional random walk. To maintain this structure, and require that at long times the measurement outcomes be independent of the path, the allowed interaction Hamil- tonians must lie in a restricted set, such that the Hamiltonian terms on the target system form a finite dimensional Jordan algebra. This algebraic structure of the interaction Hamiltonians yields a large class of generalized measurements that can be continuously performed by our scheme, and we fully describe this set.

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arXiv2015

Fault-tolerant Holonomic Quantum Computation in Surface Codes

We show that universal holonomic quantum computation (HQC) can be achieved fault-tolerantly by adiabatically deforming the gapped stabilizer Hamiltonian of the surface code, where quantum information is encoded in the degenerate ground space of the system Hamiltonian. We explicitly propose procedures to perform each logical operation, including logical state initialization, logical state measurement, logical CNOT, state injection and distillation,etc. In particular, adiabatic braiding of different types of holes on the surface leads to a topologically protected, non-Abelian geometric logical CNOT. Throughout the computation, quantum information is protected from both small perturbations and low weight thermal excitations by a constant energy gap, and is independent of the system size. Also the Hamiltonian terms have weight at most four during the whole process. The effect of thermal error propagation is considered during the adiabatic code deformation. With the help of active error correction, this scheme is fault-tolerant, in the sense that the computation time can be arbitrarily long for large enough lattice size. It is shown that the frequency of error correction and the physical resources needed can be greatly reduced by the constant energy gap.

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arXiv2015

Continuous Limit of Discrete Quantum Walks

Quantum walks can be defined in two quite distinct ways: discrete-time and continuous-time quantum walks (DTQWs and CTQWs). For classical random walks, there is a natural sense in which continuous-time walks are a limit of discrete-time walks. Quantum mechanically, in the discrete-time case, an additional "coin space" must be appended for the walk to have nontrivial time evolution. Continuous-time quantum walks, however, have no such constraints. This means that there is no completely straightforward way to treat a CTQW as a limit of DTQW, as can be done in the classical case. Various approaches to this problem have been taken in the past. We give a construction for walks on $d$-regular, $d$-colorable graphs when the coin flip operator is Hermitian: from a standard DTQW we construct a family of discrete-time walks with a well-defined continuous-time limit on a related graph. One can think of this limit as a {\it coined} continuous-time walk. We show that these CTQWs share some properties with coined DTQWs. In particular, we look at spatial search by a DTQW over the 2-D torus (a grid with periodic boundary conditions) of size $\sqrt{N}\times\sqrt{N}$, where it was shown \nocite{AAmbainis08} that a coined DTQW can search in time $O(\sqrt{N}\log{N})$, but a standard CTQW \nocite{Childs2004} takes $Ω(N)$ time to search for a marked element. The continuous limit of the DTQW search over the 2-D torus exhibits the $O(\sqrt{N}\log{N})$ scaling, like the coined walk it is derived from. We also look at the effects of graph symmetry on the limiting walk, and show that the properties are similar to those of the DTQW as shown in \cite{HariKrovi2007}.

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arXiv2014

Violating the Modified Helstrom Bound with Nonprojective Measurements

We consider the discrimination of two pure quantum states with three allowed outcomes: a correct guess, an incorrect guess, and a non-guess. To find an optimum measurement procedure, we define a tunable cost that penalizes the incorrect guess and non-guess outcomes. Minimizing this cost over all projective measurements produces a rigorous cost bound that includes the usual Helstrom discrimination bound as a special case. We then show that nonprojective measurements can outperform this modified Helstrom bound for certain choices of cost function. The Ivanovic-Dieks-Peres unambiguous state discrimination protocol is recovered as a special case of this improvement. Notably, while the cost advantage of the latter protocol is destroyed with the introduction of any amount of experimental noise, other choices of cost function have optima for which nonprojective measurements robustly show an appreciable, and thus experimentally measurable, cost advantage. Such an experiment would be an unambiguous demonstration of a benefit from nonprojective measurements.

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arXiv2014

Amplification limit of weak measurements: a variational approach

Post-selected weak measurement has been widely used in experiments to observe weak effects in various physical systems. However, it is still unclear how large the amplification ability of a weak measurement can be and what determines the limit of this ability, which is fundamental to understanding and applying weak measurements. The limitation of the conventional weak value formalism for this problem is the divergence of weak values when the pre- and post-selections are nearly orthogonal. In this paper, we study this problem by a variational approach for a general Hamiltonian $H_{\mathrm{int}}=gA\otimesΩδ(t-t_{0}),\, g\ll1$. We derive a general asymptotic solution, and show that the amplification limit is essentially independent of $g$, and determined only by the initial state of the detector and the number of distinct eigenvalues of $A$ or $Ω$. An example of spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles with a pair of Stern-Gerlach devices is given to illustrate the results. The limiting case of continuous variable systems is also investigated to demonstrate the influence of system dimension on the amplification limit.

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arXiv2014

Implementing generalized measurements with superconducting qubits

We describe a method to perform any generalized purity-preserving measurement of a qubit with techniques tailored to superconducting systems. First, we consider two methods for realizing a two-outcome partial projection: using a thresholded continuous measurement in the circuit QED setup, or using an indirect ancilla qubit measurement. Second, we decompose an arbitrary purity-preserving two-outcome measurement into single qubit unitary rotations and a partial projection. Third, we systematically reduce any multiple-outcome measurement to a sequence of such two-outcome measurements and unitary operations. Finally, we consider how to define suitable fidelity measures for multiple-outcome generalized measurements.

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arXiv2014

Continuous decomposition of quantum measurements via qubit probe feedback

It is known that any two-outcome quantum measurement can be decomposed into a continuous stochastic process using a feedback loop. In this article, we characterize which of these decompositions are possible when each iteration of the feedback loop consists of a weak measurement caused by an interaction with a probe system. We restrict ourselves to the case when the probe is a qubit and the interaction Hamiltonian between the probe and system is constant. We find that even given the ability to perform arbitrary unitary pulses throughout the continuous decomposition, only generalized measurements with two distinct singular values are achievable. However, this is sufficient to decompose a generalized qubit measurement using a qubit probe and a simple interaction Hamiltonian.

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arXiv2014

A Fault-Tolerant Scheme of Holonomic Quantum Computation on Stabilizer Codes with Robustness to Low-weight Thermal Noise

We show an equivalence relation between fault-tolerant circuits for a stabilizer code and fault-tolerant adiabatic processes for holonomic quantum computation (HQC), in the case where quantum information is encoded in the degenerated ground space of the system Hamiltonian. By this equivalence, we can systematically construct a fault-tolerant HQC scheme, which can geometrically implement a universal set of encoded quantum gates by adiabatically deforming the system Hamiltonian. During this process, quantum information is protected from low weight thermal excitations by an energy gap that does not change with the problem size.

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