Imaging Stars with Quantum Error Correction.

The development of high-resolution, large-baseline optical interferometers would revolutionize astronomical imaging. However, classical techniques are hindered by physical limitations including loss, noise, and the fact that the received light is generally quantum in nature. We show how to overcome these issues using quantum communication techniques. We present a general framework for using quantum error correction codes for protecting and imaging starlight received at distant telescope sites. In our scheme, the quantum state of light is coherently captured into a nonradiative atomic state via stimulated Raman adiabatic passage, which is then imprinted into a quantum error correction code. The code protects the signal during subsequent potentially noisy operations necessary to extract the image parameters. We show that even a small quantum error correction code can offer significant protection against noise. For large codes, we find noise thresholds below which the information can be preserved. Our scheme represents an application for near-term quantum devices that can increase imaging resolution beyond what is feasible using classical techniques.

Geometric Pathway to Scalable Quantum Sensing.

Entangled resources enable quantum sensing that achieves Heisenberg scaling, a quadratic improvement on the standard quantum limit, but preparing large N spin entangled states is challenging in the presence of decoherence. We present a quantum control strategy using highly nonlinear geometric phase gates which can be used for generic state or unitary synthesis on the Dicke subspace with O(N) or O(N^{2}) gates, respectively. The method uses a dispersive coupling of the spins to a common bosonic mode and does not require addressability, special detunings, or interactions between the spins. By using amplitude amplification our control sequence for preparing states ideal for metrology can be significantly simplified to O(N^{5/4}) geometric phase gates with action angles O(1/N) that are more robust to mode decay. The geometrically closed path of the control operations ensures the gates are insensitive to the initial state of the mode and the sequence has built-in dynamical decoupling providing resilience to dephasing errors.

Deterministic generation of an on-demand Fock state.

We theoretically study the deterministic generation of photon Fock states on-demand using a protocol based on a Jaynes Cummings quantum random walk which includes damping. We then show how each of the steps of this protocol can be implemented in a low temperature solid-state quantum system with a Nitrogen-Vacancy centre in a nanodiamond coupled to a nearby high-Q optical cavity. By controlling the coupling duration between the NV and the cavity via the application of a time dependent Stark shift, and by increasing the decay rate of the NV via stimulated emission depletion (STED) a Fock state with high photon number can be generated on-demand. Our setup can be integrated on a chip and can be accurately controlled.

Quantum walks with non-Abelian anyons.

We study the single particle dynamics of a mobile non-Abelian anyon hopping around many pinned anyons on a surface, by modeling it with a discrete time quantum walk. During the evolution, the spatial degree of freedom of the mobile anyon becomes entangled with the fusion degrees of freedom of the collective system. Each quantum trajectory makes a closed braid on the world lines of the particles establishing a direct connection between statistical dynamics and quantum link invariants. We find that asymptotically a mobile Ising model anyon becomes so entangled with its environment that its statistical dynamics reduces to a classical random walk with linear dispersion in contrast to particles with Abelian statistics which have quadratic dispersion.

Fault tolerance with noisy and slow measurements and preparation.

It is not so well known that measurement-free quantum error correction protocols can be designed to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing. Despite their potential advantages in terms of the relaxation of accuracy, speed, and addressing requirements, they have usually been overlooked since they are expected to yield a very bad threshold. We show that this is not the case. We design fault-tolerant circuits for the 9-qubit Bacon-Shor code and find an error threshold for unitary gates and preparation of p((p,g)thresh)=3.76×10(-5) (30% of the best known result for the same code using measurement) while admitting up to 1/3 error rates for measurements and allocating no constraints on measurement speed. We further show that demanding gate error rates sufficiently below the threshold pushes the preparation threshold up to p((p)thresh)=1/3.

Quantum computational renormalization in the Haldane phase.

Single-spin measurements on the ground state of an interacting spin lattice can be used to perform a quantum computation. We show how such measurements can mimic renormalization group transformations and remove the short-ranged variations of the state that can reduce the fidelity of a computation. This suggests that the quantum computational ability of a spin lattice could be a robust property of a quantum phase. We illustrate our idea with the ground state of a rotationally invariant spin-1 chain, which can serve as a quantum computational wire not only at the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki point, but within the Haldane phase.

Room-temperature spontaneous superradiance from single diamond nanocrystals.

Superradiance (SR) is a cooperative phenomenon which occurs when an ensemble of quantum emitters couples collectively to a mode of the electromagnetic field as a single, massive dipole that radiates photons at an enhanced rate. Previous studies on solid-state systems either reported SR from sizeable crystals with at least one spatial dimension much larger than the wavelength of the light and/or only close to liquid-helium temperatures. Here, we report the observation of room-temperature superradiance from single, highly luminescent diamond nanocrystals with spatial dimensions much smaller than the wavelength of light, and each containing a large number (~ 103) of embedded nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres. The results pave the way towards a systematic study of SR in a well-controlled, solid-state quantum system at room temperature.

Macroscopic superpositions and gravimetry with quantum magnetomechanics.

Precision measurements of gravity can provide tests of fundamental physics and are of broad practical interest for metrology. We propose a scheme for absolute gravimetry using a quantum magnetomechanical system consisting of a magnetically trapped superconducting resonator whose motion is controlled and measured by a nearby RF-SQUID or flux qubit. By driving the mechanical massive resonator to be in a macroscopic superposition of two different heights our we predict that our interferometry protocol could, subject to systematic errors, achieve a gravimetric sensitivity of Δg/g ~ 2.2 × 10-10 Hz-1/2, with a spatial resolution of a few nanometres. This sensitivity and spatial resolution exceeds the precision of current state of the art atom-interferometric and corner-cube gravimeters by more than an order of magnitude, and unlike classical superconducting interferometers produces an absolute rather than relative measurement of gravity. In addition, our scheme takes measurements at ~10 kHz, a region where the ambient vibrational noise spectrum is heavily suppressed compared the ~10 Hz region relevant for current cold atom gravimeters.

Measurement-based quantum computer in the gapped ground state of a two-body Hamiltonian.

We propose a scheme for a ground-code measurement-based quantum computer, which enjoys two major advantages. First, every logical qubit is encoded in the gapped degenerate ground subspace of a spin-1 chain with nearest-neighbor two-body interactions, so that it equips built-in robustness against noise. Second, computation is processed by single-spin measurements along multiple chains dynamically coupled on demand, so as to keep teleporting only logical information into a gap-protected ground state of the residual chains after the interactions with spins to be measured are turned off. We describe implementations using trapped atoms or polar molecules in an optical lattice, where the gap is expected to be as large as 0.2 or 4.8 kHz, respectively.

Quantum control of a trapped electron spin in a quantum dot using photon polarization.

We present an original scheme to rotate at will one electron spin trapped in a quantum dot by just acting on pump-laser polarization: The quantum control is based on the virtual excitation of electron light-hole pairs with pi symmetry, as possibly done by using a single laser beam with a propagation axis slightly tilted with respect to a weak magnetic field. This allows us to fully control the effective axis of the electron spin rotation through the pump polarization. Our analysis shows that quantum dots with inverted valence states are ideal candidates for ultrafast, high-fidelity, all optical control.

Asymptotically optimal quantum circuits for d-level systems.

Scalability of a quantum computation requires that the information be processed on multiple subsystems. However, it is unclear how the complexity of a quantum algorithm, quantified by the number of entangling gates, depends on the subsystem size. We examine the quantum circuit complexity for exactly universal computation on many d-level systems (qudits). Both a lower bound and a constructive upper bound on the number of two-qudit gates result, proving a sharp asymptotic of theta(d(2n)) gates. This closes the complexity question for all d-level systems (d finite). The optimal asymptotic applies to systems with locality constraints, e.g., nearest neighbor interactions.