arXiv subjects

Wan-Su Bao

Publications and source records attributed to Wan-Su Bao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Efficient Measurement Error Mitigation with Subsystem-Balanced Pauli Twirling

Measurement error mitigation (MEM) is essential for realizing reliable quantum computation. Model-free measurement error mitigation (MF-MEM) is an important class of MEM methods that employs Pauli twirling-typically with a random twirling set-to convert measurement noise into a state-independent scaling factor, thereby enabling error mitigation through simple calibration. However, such methods face prohibitive sampling overhead, limiting their scalability. To address this, we introduce subsystem-balanced Pauli twirling (SB-PT), a twirling method designed for MF-MEM that enforces Pauli operator balance on measuring subsystems to selectively suppress dominant measurement noise. Theoretically, for a weight-r Pauli observable, SB-PT removes all independent error components using only O[4^r] random circuits, substantially reducing the sampling overhead over conventional Pauli twirling. This efficiency gain is most significant for sparse observables. To extend such resource-efficient mitigation to arbitrary observables, we develop a hardware-efficient measurement transformation framework that converts high-weight Pauli operators into low-weight effective ones via linear-depth circuits. The circuit noise introduced during this transformation is jointly mitigated with native measurement noise using a unified twirling protocol, ensuring robust performance. Extensive numerical simulations demonstrate a greater than 16-fold improvement in sampling efficiency over conventional random twirling, with consistent performance gains across varying system sizes and error regimes. This work provides a resource-frugal and experimentally viable path toward high-fidelity measurement in near-term quantum devices.

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arXiv2025

Phase-selective tripartite entanglement and asymmetric Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering in squeezed optomechanics

The generation and manipulation of multipartite entanglement and EPR steering in macroscopic systems not only play a fundamental role in exploring the nature of quantum mechanics, but are also at the core of current developments of various nascent quantum technologies. Here we report a theoretical method using squeezing-phase-controlled quantum noise flows to selectively generate and manipulate quantum entanglement and asymmetric EPR steering in a nonlinear $χ^{(2)}$ whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) optomechanical resonator. We show that by pumping the $χ^{(2)}$ nonlinear medium with two-photon optical fields and broadband squeezed lights, a pair of counterpropagating squeezed optical modes could be introduced to the WGM resonator, each coupled with an independent squeezed vacuum reservoir. This configuration could enable squeezing-phase-controlled light-reservoir interaction for each squeezed optical mode, providing a flexible tool for tailoring asymmetric optical noise flows in the counterpropagating modes. Based on this unique feature, it is found that with the injection of asymmetric noise flows, the generation of various types of bipartite and tripartite entanglement become phase-dependent and thus they can be produced in an asymmetric way. More excitingly, it is also found that by further properly adjusting the squeezing parameters, the overall asymmetry of EPR steering can also be stepwise driven from no-way regime, one-way regime to two-way regime. These findings, holding promise for preparing rich types of entangled quantum resources with asymmetric features, may have potential applications in the area of secure quantum information processing such as quantum secure direct communication and one-way quantum computing.

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arXiv2025

Security Analysis of Mode-Pairing Quantum Key Distribution with Flexible Pairing Strategy

Mode-pairing quantum key distribution (MP-QKD) is advantageous for long-distance secure communication, leveraging its simple implementation and quadratic scaling capacity. The post-measurement pairing in MP-QKD alleviates the photon-coincidence demands, which is essential for surpassing the fundamental limit to the key-rate transmission. In this work, we propose an improved decoy-state MP-QKD protocol featuring a flexible and efficient pairing strategy. We prove the security of the proposed scheme by presenting an entanglement model for decoy-state MP-QKD. The simulation results show that the secret key rate (SKR) can be enhanced among all distances. Notably, compared with the original scheme [Nature Communication 13, 3903 (2022)], the improvement of SKR is greater than 65\% within 375 km in the asymptotic case and greater than 50\% within 400 km in the finite case. And the achievable distance can be extended in the finite case, especially with a small block length. The simulation results demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed scheme, which is expected to promote the practical applicability of MP-QKD. Furthermore, the entanglement model could provide a theoretical framework for further security and performance analysis of decoy-state MP-QKD.

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arXiv2025

Experimental Frequency-Comb-Based Mode-Pairing Quantum Key Distribution Beyond the Rate-Loss Limit

Mode-pairing quantum key distribution (MP-QKD) offers significant potential for long-distance secure communication, benefiting from its quadratic scaling capacity and phase compensation-free characteristic. However, MP-QKD still requires stringent wavelength consistency between remote lasers, which is impractical with commercial lasers without locking. In this work, we develop a simple optical-frequency-comb-based MP-QKD system to simultaneously establish coherence and distribute keys with free-running commercial lasers. We implement the experiment over standard single-mode fiber with a loss coefficient of 0.2 dB/km. The system achieves finite-size secret key rates (SKRs) of 561.26, 113.59, and 10.20 bits per second over 303.37, 354.62, and 404.25 km, which are 1.0267, 2.5230, and 2.1033 times of the rate-loss limit. Besides, the SKR over 202.31 km is 8695.34 bits per second, which is sufficient to support practical cryptographic applications. These results validate the practicality and robustness of our method, offering a simplified yet high-performance framework for long-distance secure communication.

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arXiv2025

Entanglement Model for Mode-Pairing Quantum Key Distribution

Mode-pairing (MP) quantum key distribution (QKD) eliminates the requirements of phase locking and phase tracking compared with twin-field (TF) QKD while still surpassing the fundamental rate-distance limit of QKD. The complexity of the experimental implementation is reduced while the efficiency can still be guaranteed. In MP-QKD, two communication parties need to pair two effective rounds according to the announced results by the third party. Therefore, it is not intuitive how to provide an entanglement protocol equivalent to the prepare-and-measure protocol for proving security. At present, the security of MP-QKD is rigorously proven by examining the consistency of the states detailly between MP-QKD and the fixed-pairing scheme under all of Eve's possible interference to obtain the equivalence, and verifying the security of the latter. Here, we directly present an entanglement model for MP-QKD by proposing a free-pairing entanglement scheme that is equivalent to MP-QKD. This entanglement model simplifies the security proof and provides a clearer insight into the foundation of MP-QKD. Besides, it could provide a theoretical framework for the comprehensive analysis of MP-QKD, such as facilitating practical security analysis. Additionally, we propose an optimized pairing strategy based on the entanglement model. The simulation results show an enhancement of 163\% in pairing efficiency with a reasonable pairing interval $2 \times 10^5$.

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arXiv2025

Suppressing Measurement Noise in Logical Qubits Through Measurement Scheduling

Quantum error correction is essential for reliable quantum computation, where surface codes demonstrate high fault-tolerant thresholds and hardware efficiency. However, noise in single-shot measurements limits logical readout fidelity, forming a critical bottleneck for fault-tolerant quantum computation. We propose a dynamic measurement scheduling protocol that suppresses logical readout errors by adaptively redistributing measurement tasks from error-prone qubits to stable nodes. Using shallow entangled circuits, the protocol balances gate errors and measurement noise. This is achieved by dynamically prioritizing resource allocation based on topological criticality and error metrics. When addressing realistic scenarios where temporal constraints are governed by decoherence limits and error-correction requirements, we implement reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve adaptive measurement scheduling. Numerical simulations show that logical error rates can be reduced by up to 34% across code distances for 3 to 11, with enhanced robustness in measurement-noise-dominated systems. Our protocol offers a versatile, hardware-efficient solution for high-fidelity quantum error correction, advancing large-scale quantum computing.

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arXiv2025

Physics-inspired Machine Learning for Quantum Error Mitigation

Noise is a major obstacle in current quantum computing, and Machine Learning for Quantum Error Mitigation (ML-QEM) promises to address this challenge, enhancing computational accuracy while reducing the sampling overheads of standard QEM methods. Yet, existing models lack physical interpretability and rely heavily on extensive datasets, hindering their scalability in large-scale quantum circuits. To tackle these issues, we introduce the Neural Noise Accumulation Surrogate (NNAS), a physics-inspired neural network for ML-QEM that incorporates the structural characteristics of quantum noise accumulation within multi-layer circuits, endowing the model with physical interpretability. Experimental results demonstrate that NNAS outperforms current methods across a spectrum of metrics, including error mitigation capability, quantum resource consumption, and training dataset size. Notably, for deeper circuits where QEM methods typically struggle, NNAS achieves a remarkable reduction of over half in errors. NNAS also demands substantially fewer training data, reducing dataset reliance by at least an order of magnitude, due to its ability to rapidly capture noise accumulation patterns across circuit layers. This work pioneers the integration of quantum process-derived structural characteristics into neural network architectures, broadly enhancing QEM's performance and applicability, and establishes an integrative paradigm that extends to various quantum-inspired neural network architectures.

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arXiv2024

Circuit-Noise-Resilient Virtual Distillation

Quantum error mitigation (QEM) is vital for improving quantum algorithms' accuracy on noisy near-term devices. A typical QEM method, called Virtual Distillation (VD), can suffer from imperfect implementation, potentially leading to worse outcomes than without mitigation. To address this, we introduce Circuit-Noise-Resilient Virtual Distillation (CNR-VD), which includes a calibration process using simple input states to enhance VD's performance despite circuit noise, aiming to recover the results of an ideally conducted VD circuit. Simulations show that CNR-VD significantly mitigates noise-induced errors in VD circuits, boosting accuracy by up to tenfold over standard VD. It provides positive error mitigation even under high noise, where standard VD fails. Furthermore, our estimator's versatility extends its utility beyond VD, enhancing outcomes in general Hadamard-Test circuits. The proposed CNR-VD significantly enhances the noise-resilience of VD, and thus is anticipated to elevate the performance of quantum algorithm implementations on near-term quantum devices.

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arXiv2024

Quantum Advantage: A Single Qubit's Experimental Edge in Classical Data Storage

We implement an experiment on a photonic quantum processor establishing efficacy of the elementary quantum system in classical information storage. The advantage is established by considering a class of simple bipartite games played with the communication resource qubit and classical bit (c-bit), respectively. Conventional wisdom, supported by the no-go theorems of Holevo and Frenkel-Weiner, suggests that such a quantum advantage is unattainable when the sender and receiver share randomness or classical correlations. However, our results reveal a quantum advantage in a scenario devoid of any shared randomness. Our experiment involves the development of a variational triangular polarimeter, enabling the realization of positive operator value measurements crucial for establishing the targeted quantum advantage. Beyond showcasing a robust communication advantage with a single qubit, our work paves the way for immediate applications in near-term quantum technologies. It provides a semi-device-independent certification scheme for quantum encoding-decoding systems and offers an efficient method for information loading and transmission in quantum networks.

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arXiv2024

Quantum key distribution based on mid-infrared and telecom band two-color entanglement source

Due to the high noise caused by solar background radiation, the existing satellite-based free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) experiments are mainly carried out at night, hindering the establishment of a practical all-day real-time global-scale quantum network. Given that the 3-5 μm mid-infrared (MIR) band has extremely low solar background radiation and strong scattering resistance, it is one of the ideal bands for free-space quantum communication. Here, firstly, we report on the preparation of a high-quality MIR (3370 nm) and telecom band (1555 nm) two-color polarization-entangled photon source, then we use this source to realize a principle QKD based on free-space and fiber hybrid channels in a laboratory. The theoretical analysis clearly shows that a long-distance QKD over 500 km of free-space and 96 km of fiber hybrid channels can be reached simultaneously. This work represents a significant step toward developing all-day global-scale quantum communication networks.

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arXiv2023

Quantum State Compression Shadow

Quantum state readout serves as the cornerstone of quantum information processing, exerting profound influence on quantum communication, computation, and metrology. In this study, we introduce an innovative readout architecture called Compression Shadow (CompShadow), which transforms the conventional readout paradigm by compressing multi-qubit states into single-qubit shadows before measurement. Compared to direct measurements of the initial quantum states, CompShadow achieves comparable accuracy in amplitude and observable expectation estimation while consuming similar measurement resources. Furthermore, its implementation on near-term quantum hardware with nearest-neighbor coupling architectures is straightforward. Significantly, CompShadow brings forth novel features, including the complete suppression of correlated readout noise, fundamentally reducing the quantum hardware demands for readout. It also facilitates the exploration of multi-body system properties through single-qubit probes and opens the door to designing quantum communication protocols with exponential loss suppression. Our findings mark the emergence of a new era in quantum state readout, setting the stage for a revolutionary leap in quantum information processing capabilities.

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arXiv2022

Near-Term Quantum Computing Techniques: Variational Quantum Algorithms, Error Mitigation, Circuit Compilation, Benchmarking and Classical Simulation

Quantum computing is a game-changing technology for global academia, research centers and industries including computational science, mathematics, finance, pharmaceutical, materials science, chemistry and cryptography. Although it has seen a major boost in the last decade, we are still a long way from reaching the maturity of a full-fledged quantum computer. That said, we will be in the Noisy-Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era for a long time, working on dozens or even thousands of qubits quantum computing systems. An outstanding challenge, then, is to come up with an application that can reliably carry out a nontrivial task of interest on the near-term quantum devices with non-negligible quantum noise. To address this challenge, several near-term quantum computing techniques, including variational quantum algorithms, error mitigation, quantum circuit compilation and benchmarking protocols, have been proposed to characterize and mitigate errors, and to implement algorithms with a certain resistance to noise, so as to enhance the capabilities of near-term quantum devices and explore the boundaries of their ability to realize useful applications. Besides, the development of near-term quantum devices is inseparable from the efficient classical simulation, which plays a vital role in quantum algorithm design and verification, error-tolerant verification and other applications. This review will provide a thorough introduction of these near-term quantum computing techniques, report on their progress, and finally discuss the future prospect of these techniques, which we hope will motivate researchers to undertake additional studies in this field.

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arXiv2022

Sideband Cooling of a Trapped Ion in Strong Sideband Coupling Regime

Conventional theoretical studies on the ground-state laser cooling of a trapped ion have mostly focused on the weak sideband coupling (WSC) regime, where the cooling rate is inverse proportional to the linewidth of the excited state. In a recent work~[New J. Phys. 23, 023018 (2021)], we proposed a theoretical framework to study the ground state cooling of a trapped ion in the strong sideband coupling (SSC) regime, under the assumption of a vanishing carrier transition. Here we extend this analysis to more general situations with nonvanishing carrier transitions, where we show that by properly tuning the coupling lasers a cooling rate proportional to the linewidth can be achieved. Our theoretical predictions closely agree with the corresponding exact solutions in the SSC regime, which provide an important theoretical guidance for sideband cooling experiments.

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arXiv2022

Noise-Resistant Quantum State Compression Readout

Qubit measurement is generally the most error-prone operation that degrades the performance of near-term quantum devices, and the exponential decay of readout fidelity severely impedes the development of large-scale quantum information processing. Given these disadvantages, we present a quantum state readout method, named \textit{compression readout}, that naturally avoids large multi-qubit measurement errors by compressing the quantum state into a single qubit for measurement. Our method generally outperforms direct measurements in terms of accuracy, and the advantage grows with the system size. Moreover, because only one-qubit measurements are performed, our method requires solely a fine readout calibration on one qubit and is free of correlated measurement error, which drastically diminishes the demand for device calibration. These advantages suggest that our method can immediately boost the readout performance of near-term quantum devices and will greatly benefit the development of large-scale quantum computing.

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arXiv2022

Evaluating the Resilience of Variational Quantum Algorithms to Leakage Noise

As we are entering the era of constructing practical quantum computers, suppressing the inevitable noise to accomplish reliable computational tasks will be the primary goal. Leakage noise, as the amplitude population leaking outside the qubit subspace, is a particularly damaging source of error that error correction approaches cannot handle. However, the impact of this noise on the performance of variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), a type of near-term quantum algorithms that is naturally resistant to a variety of noises, is yet unknown. Here, {we consider a typical scenario with the widely used hardware-efficient ansatz and the emergence of leakage in two-qubit gates}, observing that leakage noise generally reduces the expressive power of VQAs. Furthermore, we benchmark the influence of leakage noise on VQAs in real-world learning tasks. Results show that, both for data fitting and data classification, leakage noise generally has a negative impact on the training process and final outcomes. Our findings give strong evidence that VQAs are vulnerable to leakage noise in most cases, implying that leakage noise must be effectively suppressed in order to achieve practical quantum computing applications, whether for near-term quantum algorithms and long-term error-correcting quantum computing.

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arXiv2022

Active Learning on a Programmable Photonic Quantum Processor

Training a quantum machine learning model generally requires a large labeled dataset, which incurs high labeling and computational costs. To reduce such costs, a selective training strategy, called active learning (AL), chooses only a subset of the original dataset to learn while maintaining the trained model's performance. Here, we design and implement two AL-enpowered variational quantum classifiers, to investigate the potential applications and effectiveness of AL in quantum machine learning. Firstly, we build a programmable free-space photonic quantum processor, which enables the programmed implementation of various hybrid quantum-classical computing algorithms. Then, we code the designed variational quantum classifier with AL into the quantum processor, and execute comparative tests for the classifiers with and without the AL strategy. The results validate the great advantage of AL in quantum machine learning, as it saves at most $85\%$ labeling efforts and $91.6\%$ percent computational efforts compared to the training without AL on a data classification task. Our results inspire AL's further applications in large-scale quantum machine learning to drastically reduce training data and speed up training, underpinning the exploration of practical quantum advantages in quantum physics or real-world applications.

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arXiv2022

Parameter-Parallel Distributed Variational Quantum Algorithm

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a promising near-term technique to explore practical quantum advantage on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. However, the inefficient parameter training process due to the incompatibility with backpropagation and the cost of a large number of measurements, posing a great challenge to the large-scale development of VQAs. Here, we propose a parameter-parallel distributed variational quantum algorithm (PPD-VQA), to accelerate the training process by parameter-parallel training with multiple quantum processors. To maintain the high performance of PPD-VQA in the realistic noise scenarios, a alternate training strategy is proposed to alleviate the acceleration attenuation caused by noise differences among multiple quantum processors, which is an unavoidable common problem of distributed VQA. Besides, the gradient compression is also employed to overcome the potential communication bottlenecks. The achieved results suggest that the PPD-VQA could provide a practical solution for coordinating multiple quantum processors to handle large-scale real-word applications.

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arXiv2021

Parallel-Electromagnetically-Induced-Transparency Near Ground-State Cooling of a Trapped-ion Crystal

We theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a parallel-electromagnetically-induced transparency (parallel-EIT) cooling technique for ion crystals in the Paul trap. It has less stringent requirements on the cooling resonance condition than the standard electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) cooling, thus allowing, in principle, to simultaneously cool the motional mode spectrum with an arbitrary range. A proof-of-principle validation for this cooling scheme is experimentally demonstrated with up to 4 trapped 40Ca+ ions. We observe simultaneous near-ground-state cooling for all motional modes with best average phonon number about 0.2. By tuning the trap frequency in a large range to imitate a broadband motional mode spectrum, we can still reach almost the same cooling limit for all the modes while standard EIT cooling shows limited cooling range. Our method has a simple experimental configuration, requiring only appropriate modulation of the probe beam of standard EIT cooling, and can be applied to various types of ions (e.g., 171Yb+, 40Ca+). This cooling scheme provides a powerful tool for the initialization of the trapped-ion quantum computers and simulators.

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