Recent advances illustrate the power of reservoir engineering in applications to many-body systems, such as quantum simulators based on superconducting circuits. We present a framework based on kinetic equations and noise spectra that can be used to understand both the transient and long-time dynamics of many particles coupled to an engineered reservoir in a number-conserving way. For the example of a bosonic array, we show that the nonequilibrium steady state can be expressed, in a wide parameter regime, in terms of a modified Bose-Einstein distribution with an energy-dependent temperature.

We develop protocols for high-fidelity single-qubit gates that exploit and extend theoretical ideas for accelerated adiabatic evolution. Our protocols are compatible with qubit architectures where direct transitions between logical states are either vanishingly small or nonexistent; in such systems traditional approaches cannot be implemented. Prime examples are superconducting fluxonium qubits, which have highly localized states, and AMO systems, where there are no dipole allowed transitions between the ground states encoding the logical states. By using an accelerated adiabatic protocol we can enforce the desired adiabatic evolution while having gate times that are comparable to the inverse adiabatic energy gap (a scale that is ultimately set by the amount of power used in the control pulses). By modeling the effects of decoherence, we explore the trade-off between speed and robustness that is inherent to shortcuts-to-adiabaticity approaches.

We demonstrate the use of shortcuts to adiabaticity protocols for initialization, read-out, and coherent control of dressed states generated by closed-contour, coherent driving of a single spin. Such dressed states have recently been shown to exhibit efficient coherence protection, beyond what their two-level counterparts can offer. Our state transfer protocols yield a transfer fidelity of ~99.4(2)% while accelerating the transfer speed by a factor of 2.6 compared to the adiabatic approach. We show bidirectionality of the accelerated state transfer, which we employ for direct dressed state population read-out after coherent manipulation in the dressed state manifold. Our results enable direct and efficient access to coherence-protected dressed states of individual spins and thereby offer attractive avenues for applications in quantum information processing or quantum sensing.

Microwave squeezing represents the ultimate sensitivity frontier for superconducting qubit measurement. However, measurement enhancement has remained elusive, in part because integration with standard dispersive readout pollutes the signal channel with antisqueezed noise. Here we induce a stroboscopic light-matter coupling with superior squeezing compatibility, and observe an increase in the final signal-to-noise ratio of 24%. Squeezing the orthogonal phase slows measurement-induced dephasing by a factor of 1.8. This scheme provides a means to the practical application of squeezing for qubit measurement.

We present a method for accelerating adiabatic protocols for systems involving a coupling to a continuum, one that cancels both nonadiabatic errors as well as errors due to dissipation. We focus on applications to a generic quantum state transfer problem, where the goal is to transfer a state between a single level or mode, and a propagating temporal mode in a waveguide or transmission line. Our approach enables perfect adiabatic transfer protocols in this setup, despite a finite protocol speed and a finite waveguide coupling. Our approach even works in highly constrained settings, where there is only a single time-dependent control field available.

Adiabatic processes are useful for quantum technologies but, despite their robustness to experimental imperfections, they remain susceptible to decoherence due to their long evolution time. A general strategy termed shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA) aims to remedy this vulnerability by designing fast dynamics to reproduce the results of a slow, adiabatic evolution. Here, we implement an STA technique known as superadiabatic transitionless driving (SATD) to speed up stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a solid-state lambda system. Using the optical transitions to a dissipative excited state in the nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond, we demonstrate the accelerated performance of different shortcut trajectories for population transfer and for the initialization and transfer of coherent superpositions. We reveal that SATD protocols exhibit robustness to dissipation and experimental uncertainty, and can be optimized when these effects are present. These results suggest that STA could be effective for controlling a variety of solid-state open quantum systems.

Stückelberg interferometry describes the interference of two strongly coupled modes during a double passage through an avoided energy level crossing. In this work, we investigate finite-time effects in Stückelberg interferometry and discuss the exact analytical solution of the double passage Stückelberg problem by expanding the finite-time solution of the Landau-Zener problem. Approximating the return probability amplitudes of the double passage in distinct limits reveals uncharted parameter regimes of Stückelberg interferometry where finite-time effects affect the coherent exchange of energy. We find the long-time limit of the exact solution to formally coincide with the well-established adiabatic impulse model which is, to the best of our knowledge, the only regime of Stückelberg interferometry reported so far. Experimentally, we study all predicted regimes using a purely classical, strongly coupled nanomechanical two-mode system of high quality factor. The classical two-mode system consists of the in-plane and out-of-plane fundamental flexural mode of a high stress silicon nitride string resonator, coupled via electric gradient fields. We exploit our experimental and theoretical findings by studying the onset of Stückelberg interference in dependence of the characteristic system control parameters and obtain characteristic excitation oscillations between the two modes even without the explicit need of traversing the avoided crossing. The presented findings are not limited to classical mechanical two-mode systems but can be applied to every strongly coupled (quantum) two-level system, for example a spin-1/2 system or superconducting qubit.

We present a systematic, perturbative method for correcting quantum gates to suppress errors that take the target system out of a chosen subspace. Our method addresses the generic problem of nonadiabatic errors in adiabatic evolution and state preparation, as well as general leakage errors due to spurious couplings to undesirable states. The method is based on the Magnus expansion: By correcting control pulses, we modify the Magnus expansion of an initially given, imperfect unitary in such a way that the desired evolution is obtained. Applications to adiabatic quantum state transfer, superconducting qubits, and generalized Landau-Zener problems are discussed.

Stückelberg interferometry is a phenomenon that has been well established for quantum-mechanical two-level systems. Here, we present classical two-mode interference of a nanomechanical two-mode system, realizing a classical analog of Stückelberg interferometry. Our experiment relies on the coherent energy exchange between two strongly coupled, high-quality factor nanomechanical resonator modes. Furthermore, we discuss an exact theoretical solution for the double-passage Stückelberg problem by expanding the established finite-time Landau-Zener single-passage solution. For the parameter regime explored in the experiment, we find that the Stückelberg return probability in the classical version of the problem formally coincides with the quantum case, which reveals the analogy of the return probabilities in the quantum-mechanical and the classical version of the problem. This result qualifies classical two-mode systems at large to simulate quantum-mechanical interferometry.

Stückelberg interferometry is a phenomenon that has been well established for quantum-mechanical two-level systems. Here, we present classical two-mode interference of a nanomechanical two-mode system, realizing a classical analog of Stückelberg interferometry. Our experiment relies on the exchange between two strongly coupled, high-quality factor nanomechanical resonator modes. Furthermore, we discuss an exact theoretical solution for the double-passage Stückelberg problem by expanding the established finite-time Landau-Zener single-passage solution. For the parameter regime explored in the experiment, we find that the Stückelberg return probability in the classical version of the problem formally coincides with the quantum case, which reveals the analogy of the return probabilities in the quantum-mechanical and the classical version of the problem. This result qualifies classical two-mode systems at large to simulate quantum-mechanical interferometry.

We show that the effective hyperfine interaction for heavy-hole states (or any particle described with a p-like Bloch function) can induce nontrivial dynamics of nuclear spins. Experimental evidence can be found, e.g., in self-assembled quantum dots by measuring the saturation of nuclear spin polarization with different orientations of an external magnetic field.

A recent experiment [EA Chekhovich et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 066804 (2010)] has demonstrated that high nuclear spin polarization can be achieved in self-assembled quantum dots by exploiting an optically forbidden transition between a heavy hole and a trion state. However, a fully polarized state is not achieved as expected from a classical rate equation. Here, we theoretically investigate this problem with the help of a quantum master equation and we demonstrate that a fully polarized state cannot be achieved due to formation of a nuclear dark state. Moreover, we show that the maximal degree of polarization depends on structural properties of the quantum dot.

We study Landau-Zener dynamics in a double quantum dot filled with two electrons, where the spin states can become correlated with charge states and the level velocity can be tuned in a time-dependent fashion. We show that a correct interpretation of experimental data is only possible when finite-time effects are taken into account. In addition, our formalism allows the study of partial adiabatic dynamics in the presence of phonon-mediated hyperfine relaxation and charge-noise-induced dephasing. Our findings demonstrate that charge noise severely impacts the visibility of Landau-Zener-Stückelberg-Majorana interference fringes. This indicates that charge coherence must be treated on an equal footing with spin coherence.

Semiconducting quantum dots have been extensively investigated with the idea of using single spins for quantum computing. Whereas access to single electrons and their spins has become routine, the challenges posed by nuclear spins remain ever present.

We study finite-time Landau-Zener transitions at a singlet-triplet level crossing in a GaAs double quantum dot, both experimentally and theoretically. Sweeps across the anticrossing in the high driving speed limit result in oscillations with a small visibility. Here we demonstrate how to increase the oscillation visibility while keeping sweep times shorter than T ₂ ^* using a tailored pulse with a detuning dependent level velocity. Our results show an improvement of a factor of ~2.9 for the oscillation visibility. In particular, we were able to obtain a visibility of ~0.5 for Stückelberg oscillations, which demonstrates the creation of an equally weighted superposition of the qubit states.

The dynamics of an electron interacting with an atomic nucleus is mainly governed by the Coulomb interaction. It is this “classical” reasoning that allows us to write the Hamiltonian for the hydrogen atom as the sum of the kinetic energy and the energy of the electrostatic interaction between the electron and the proton. However, this theoretical description of the hydrogen atom cannot entirely explain the observed spectra. Those can only be fully understood in a relativistic model, where for example all the magnetic effects due to the spin of the electron are taken into account. Although the spin-orbit interaction, being one of the relativistic corrections, is important for electron-spin coherence in quantum dots (QDs), we focus on another, equally important, aspect in this chapter: the hyperfine interaction arising from the magnetic coupling between the nuclear and electronic spins.

We theoretically demonstrate that nuclear spins can be harnessed to coherently control two-electron spin states in a double quantum dot. Hyperfine interactions lead to an avoided crossing between the spin singlet state and the m _s = +1 triplet state, T ₊. We show that a coherent superposition of singlet and triplet states can be achieved using finite-time Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interferometry. In this system the coherent rotation rate is set by the Zeeman energy, resulting in ~1 ns single spin rotations. We analyze the coherence of this spin qubit by considering the coupling to the nuclear spin bath and show that T ₂ ^* ~ 16 ns, in good agreement with experimental data. Our analysis further demonstrates that efficient single qubit and two-qubit control can be achieved using Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interferometry.

We theoretically model a nuclear-state preparation scheme that increases the coherence time of a two-spin qubit in a double quantum dot. The two-electron system is tuned repeatedly across a singlet-triplet level anticrossing with alternating slow and rapid sweeps of an external bias voltage. Using a Landau-Zener-Stückelberg model, we find that in addition to a small nuclear polarization that weakly affects the electron spin coherence, the slow sweeps are only partially adiabatic and lead to a weak nuclear spin measurement and a nuclear-state narrowing which prolongs the electron spin coherence. This resolves some open problems brought up by a recent experiment [D. J. Reilly et al., Science 321, 817 (2008).]. Based on our description of the weak measurement, we simulate a system with up to n = 200 nuclear spins per dot. Scaling in n indicates a stronger effect for larger n.

We consider the doped Rokhsar-Kivelson quantum dimer model on the triangular lattice with one mobile hole (monomer) at the Rokhsar-Kivelson point. The motion of the hole is described by two branches of excitations: the hole may either move with or without a trapped Z ₂ vortex (vison). We perform a study of the hole dispersion in the limit where the hole-hopping amplitude is much smaller than the interdimer interaction. In this limit, the hole without vison moves freely and has a tight-binding spectrum. On the other hand, the hole with a trapped vison is strongly constrained due to interference effects and can only move via higher-order virtual processes.