Control of open quantum systems

This thesis describes the development, investigation and experimental implementation via liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance techniques of new methods for controlling open quantum systems. First, methods that improve coherent control through the use of both strong control fields and detailed knowledge of the subsystem's Hamiltonian are demonstrated. With the aid of numerical search methods, pulsed irradiation schemes are obtained that perform accurate, arbitrary, selective gates on multi-qubit systems. For systems of 3 and 4 qubits, simulations show that the control sequences faithfully implement unitary operations with gate fidelities on the order of 0.999 while experimentally determined correlations of 0.99 were obtained. The technique is then extended to account for the incoherent errors arising from the slow variation of control parameters. It is demonstrated in this study that such errors can be greatly counteracted directly from the design of the time-dependent control fields if some knowledge about the incoherence source is available. The results obtained show a substantial decrease of the non-unitary features normally caused by incoherent noise. The methods are applicable to a variety of experimental studies in quantum information processing.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Boulant, Nicolas

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David G. Cory.

• Nuclear Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34437

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34437