Scalable uniform construction of highly conditional quantum gates

Unlike classical digital computers in which a bit can represent either 1 or 0 at any time, quantum computers use a two-level system, i.e., a qubit, to implement logical operations based on quantum mechanical laws, which can represent both values at once. Owing to the superposition property of qubits, quantum computers have natural parallel processing advantages and thus have potential to exceed the computational efficiency of classical computers for particular tasks. Quantum logic gates are the generalization of classical logic gates in computational networks. It has been proved that two-qubit quantum gates together with one-qubit quantum gates are adequate for constructing networks with any possible quantum computational property. Directional couplers are the most critical elementsfor constructing the quantum gates. In recent years, photonic quantum technologies have emerged as a promising experimental platform for quantum computing. Single photons have robust noise resistance, long coherence time, high transmission speed and great compatibility with other systems. They can be easily manipulated and encoded in any of several degrees of freedom, for example, polarization, path, spatial mode or time bin. Optical waveguide technology enables the realizing of complex optical schemes comprised of many elements with desired scalability, stability and miniaturization. Femtosecond laser direct writing of waveguide has been adopted as a powerful tool for integrated quantum photonics with characteristics of rapidness, cost-effectiveness, mask-less and single-step process. In particular, it has the ability to build arbitrary three-dimensional circuits directly inside bulk materials, which is impossible to achieve with conventional lithography. In this article we review the femtosecond laser writing and quantum characterization of directional coupler and important one-qubit and two-qubit optical quantum logic gates, such as Hadamard gate, Pauli-X gate, controlled-NOT gate, and controlled-Phase gate. The qubits in these gates are usually encoded through optical paths or polarizations of photons. The key to the realization of polarization-encoded one-qubit gates is to achieve flexible wave-plate operations, which is described in detail. Controlled-NOT gate and controlled-phase gate are the most crucial two-qubit gates in the linear optics computation and sometimes they can be converted into each other by adding some one-qubit gates or special superposition states. Many different kinds of waveguide circuits have been used to implement these two-qubit gates. The outlook and challenges for the femtosecond laser writing of three-qubit gates, such as Toffoli gate and Fredkin gate, are briefly introduced.

The development of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices has extended the scope of executable quantum circuits with high-fidelity single- and two-qubit gates. Equipping NISQ devices with three-qubit gates will enable the realization of more complex quantum algorithms and efficient quantum error correction protocols with reduced circuit depth. Several three-qubit gates have been implemented for superconducting qubits, but their use in gate synthesis has been limited due to their low fidelity. Here, using fixed-frequency superconducting qubits, we demonstrate a high-fidelity iToffoli gate based on two-qubit interactions, the so-called cross-resonance effect. As with the Toffoli gate, this three-qubit gate can be used to perform universal quantum computation. The iToffoli gate is implemented by simultaneously applying microwave pulses to a linear chain of three qubits, revealing a process fidelity as high as 98.26(2)%. Moreover, we numerically show that our gate scheme can produce additional three-qubit gates which provide more efficient gate synthesis than the Toffoli and iToffoli gates. Our work not only brings a high-fidelity iToffoli gate to current superconducting quantum processors but also opens a pathway for developing multi-qubit gates based on two-qubit interactions.

Heteronuclear spin-echo techniques, which require the application of an inversion pulse on the second heteronucleus, may be applied with inhomogeneous rf coils such as surface coils. There are important applications in vivo including the detection of 13C-labeled and 15N-labeled metabolites in the 1H NMR spectrum. Using a depth pulse scheme for the 1H spin-echo sequence, and particular single or composite 13C pulses, two sensitive volumes are generated by the 1H and the 13C rf coils and signal is only obtained from the region of overlap between the two sensitive volumes. This method of signal localization for in vivo applications can be extended to 1H homonuclear editing and selective polarization-transfer techniques. The off-resonance characteristics of several different composite pulses are explored.

In NMR quantum computing, spin states of spin-1/2 nuclei are called qubits. Quantum logic gates are represented by unitary matrices. As a universal gate, controlled-NOT (CNOT) is a two-qubit gate. For the IS (I = 1/2 and S = 1/2) spin system, two-qubit CNOT gate is represented by a 4 × 4 matrix. SWAP logic gate, which exchanges two quantum states, is constructed by CNOT gates. In this study, first, four-qubit CNOT gates are constructed for the IS (I = 3/2, S = 3/2) spin system. Then, by using these CNOT gates, a four-qubit SWAP logic gate is found. As an application and verification, an obtained SWAP logic gate is applied to the matrix representation of product operators for the IS (I = 3/2, S = 3/2) spin system. SWAP logic gate can also be presented by an NMR pulse sequence. By using the product operator theory, the pulse sequence of the SWAP logic gate is applied to product operators of the IS (I = 3/2, S = 3/2) spin system. The expected exchange results are obtained for both the matrix representation and the pulse sequence of SWAP logic gate.

We present some deterministic schemes to construct universal quantum gates, that is, controlled- NOT, three-qubit Toffoli, and Fredkin gates, between flying photon qubits and stationary electron-spin qubits assisted by quantum dots inside double-sided optical microcavities. The control qubit of our gates is encoded on the polarization of the moving single photon and the target qubits are encoded on the confined electron spins in quantum dots inside optical microcavities. Our schemes for these universal quantum gates on a hybrid system have some advantages. First, all the gates are accomplished with the success probability of 100% in principle. Second, our schemes require no additional qubits. Third, the control qubits of the gates are easily manipulated and the target qubits are perfect for storage and processing. Fourth, the gates do not require that the transmission for the uncoupled cavity is balanceable to the reflectance for the coupled cavity, in order to get a high fidelity. Fifth, the devices for the three universal gates work in both the weak coupling and the strong coupling regimes, and they are feasible in experiment.

Entangling gates in superconducting quantum computers suffer from imperfection of control and relaxation of qubits. The Toffoli gate, essential to various quantum algorithms and to certain fast error correction schemes, represents a particular challenge, as it is decomposed into at least six two-qubit gates, whose errors accrue on top of the increased probability of qubit relaxation due to the long gate time. While it is possible to significantly reduce the depth of the Toffoli gate by exploiting three-level, i.e., qutrit states internally, existing methods are susceptible to errors arising from frequency drifts due to charge fluctuation effects in the second excited state of the transmon. In this poster, we propose a novel qutrit-based implementation of the Toffoli gate that is inherently robust against such errors. The method is extensively validated through a pulse-level simulation and experiments performed on IBM Quantum machines. On one device, where the total Toffoli gate time is 2.510μs, we obtained average gate fidelity values of 0.928 ± 0.007 and 0.896 ± 0.036 from multiple measurements performed during the first one and twenty-four hours after calibrations, respectively, where the errors represent the standard deviations of the measurement results.

Non-adiabatic holonomic quantum gate in decoherence-free subspaces is of greatly practical importance due to its built-in fault tolerance, coherence stabilization virtues, and short run-time. Here, we propose some compact schemes to implement two- and three-qubit controlled unitary quantum gates and Fredkin gate. For the controlled unitary quantum gates, the unitary operator acting on the target qubit is an arbitrary single-qubit gate operation. The controlled quantum gates can be directly implemented by utilizing non-adiabatic holonomy in decoherence-free subspaces and the required resource for the decoherence-free subspace encoding is minimal by using only two neighboring physical qubits undergoing collective dephasing to encode a logical qubit.

Universal quantum computing relies on high-fidelity entangling operations. Here, we demonstrate that four coupled qubits can operate as a quantum gate, where two qubits control the operation on two target qubits (a four-qubit gate). This configuration can implement four different controlled two-qubit gates: two different entangling swap and phase operations, a phase operation distinguishing states of different parity, and the identity operation (idle quantum gate), where the choice of gate is set by the state of the control qubits. The device exploits quantum interference to control the operation on the target qubits by coupling them to each other via the control qubits. By connecting several four-qubit devices in a two-dimensional lattice, one can achieve a highly connected quantum computer. We consider an implementation of the four-qubit gate with superconducting qubits, using capacitively coupled qubits arranged in a diamond-shaped architecture.

Toffoli gate is an especially important case of the quantum gates. In this paper, we show how to construct Toffoli gates using several additional (ancilla) photons, linear optical instruments and cross-Kerr nonlinearities. Then they are expanded to implement Extended Toffoli gates (ETOF). Our work shows only one n-IPC (w-input parity check) gate plus at most 2 m CNOT or NCNOT gates can implement arbitrary ETOF (n, m), indicating the feasibility and advantage of modularizing quantum gates with photons.

Heralded universal quantum gates can largely decrease the quantum resource consumed in the integration of a multiqubit quantum circuit. Here, we present a scheme for heralded universal quantum computing, including the construction of the CNOT gate, Fredkin gate, and Toffoli gate on the electron spins in diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers assisted by low- Q microtoroidal resonators. These quantum gates can achieve unity fidelity, as the infidelity induced by the imperfect input–output process is transferred into photon loss. The clicks on different single-photon detectors can either herald the success of the quantum gates or instruct an immediate recycling procedure, even without reinitializing the NV centers. Besides the heralding, this scheme is also more realistic, observing that the non-monochromatic auxiliary photon and the inhomogeneous NV centers have no adverse impact on fidelity. The high fidelity and efficiency with experimental parameters show that the scheme is feasible with current technology.

We propose a nonadiabatic non-Abelian geometric quantum operation scheme to realize universal quantum computation with mesoscopic Rydberg atoms. A single control atom entangles a mesoscopic ensemble of target atoms through long-range interactions between Rydberg states. We demonstrate theoretically that both the single qubit and two-qubit quantum gates can achieve high fidelities around or above 99.9% in ideal situations. Besides, to address the experimental issue of Rabi frequency fluctuation (Rabi error) in Rydberg atom and ensemble, we apply the dynamical-invariant-based zero systematic-error sensitivity (ZSS) optimal control theory to the proposed scheme. Our numerical simulations show that the average fidelity could be 99.98% for single ensemble qubit gate and 99.94% for two-qubit gate even when the Rabi frequency of the gate laser acquires 10% fluctuations. We also find that the optimized scheme can also reduce errors caused by higher-order perturbation terms in deriving the Hamiltonian of the ensemble atoms. To address the experimental issue of decoherence error between the ground state and Rydberg levels in Rydberg ensemble, we introduce a dispersive coupling regime between Rydberg and ground levels, based on which the Rydberg state is adiabatically discarded. The numerical simulation demonstrate that the quantum gate is enhanced. By combining strong Rydberg atom interactions, nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation, dynamical invariant and optimal control theory together, our scheme shows a new route to construct fast and robust quantum gates with mesoscopic atomic ensembles. Our study contributes to the ongoing effort in developing quantum information processing with Rydberg atoms trapped in optical lattices or tweezer arrays.

We propose a two-qubit quantum logic gate between a superconducting atom and a propagating microwave photon. The atomic qubit is encoded on its lowest two levels and the photonic qubit is encoded on its carrier frequencies. The gate operation completes deterministically upon reflection of a photon, and various two-qubit gates (SWAP, $\sqrt{\rm SWAP}$, and Identity) are realized through {\it in situ} control of the drive field. The proposed gate is applicable to construction of a network of superconducting atoms, which enables gate operations between non-neighboring atoms.

Verifying the correct functioning of quantum gates is a crucial step toward reliable quantum information processing, but it becomes an overwhelming challenge as the system size grows due to the dimensionality curse. Recent theoretical breakthroughs show that it is possible to verify various important quantum gates with the optimal sample complexity of O(1/ε) using local operations only, where ε is the estimation precision. In this Letter, we propose a variant of quantum gate verification (QGV) that is robust to practical gate imperfections and experimentally realize efficient QGV on a 2-qubit controlled-not gate and a 3-qubit Toffoli gate using only local state preparations and measurements. The experimental results show that, by using only 1600 and 2600 measurements on average, we can verify with 95% confidence level that the implemented controlled-not gate and Toffoli gate have fidelities of at least 99% and 97%, respectively. Demonstrating the superior low sample complexity and experimental feasibility of QGV, our work promises a solution to the dimensionality curse in verifying large quantum devices in the quantum era.

Besides noticeable challenges in implementing low-error single- and two-qubit quantum gates in superconducting quantum processors, the readout technique and analysis are a key factor in determining the efficiency and performance of quantum processors. Being able to efficiently implement quantum algorithms involving entangling gates and asses their output is mandatory for quantum utility. In a transmon-based 5-qubit superconducting quantum processor, we compared the performance of quantum circuits involving an increasing level of complexity, from single-qubit circuits to maximally entangled Bell circuits. This comparison highlighted the importance of the readout analysis and helped us optimize the protocol for more advanced quantum algorithms. Here, we report the results obtained from the analysis of the outputs of quantum circuits using two readout paradigms, referred to as “multiplied readout probabilities” and “conditional readout probabilities.” The first method is suitable for single-qubit circuits, while the second is essential for accurately interpreting the outputs of circuits involving two-qubit gates.

Quantum logic gates are the essential components of quantum computation and have broad practical applications, especially for the multiple-qubit logic gates. Compared with appliying a series of single- and two-qubit gates, constrcuting quantum computation with multiple-qubit logic gates can be more efficient and high-fidelity. As a three-qubit logic gate, Deutsch gate enables the realization of any feasible quantum computations. Based on neutral atoms, we present a scheme of super-robust Deutsch gate via optimal control technique. Utilizing the Rydberg blockade effect of neutral atoms, we design an implementable D(β) based on the three-step program. One of the notable advantages of this function is that β can be achieved arbitrarily between 0 and π with the operation of target atom. In addition, we give an analytical solution agreed very well with numerical simulations for the residual blocking effect between next-neighbor atoms that affects the performance quality of Deutsch gate. The fidelity of our proposed scheme is demonstrated by numerical simulation of the master equation based on the full Hamiltonian, and the robustness of our scheme with control errors is also illustrated. Our proposal offers an alternative promising scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Published by the American Physical Society 2024