Fundamental limit to Qubit Control with Coherent Field

TL;DR

This paper investigates the fundamental quantum limit of qubit control fidelity using a fully quantum mechanical approach, revealing that initial qubit state significantly influences control accuracy and error scaling with photon number.

Contribution

It provides a quantum mechanical analysis of qubit control fidelity limits, highlighting the initial state dependence and non-linear error accumulation effects.

Findings

Fidelity error scales inversely with photon number similar to previous results.

Error is substantially smaller when the qubit starts in the ground state.

Error accumulation in successive controls is non-linear and initial state-dependent.

Abstract

The ultimate accuracy as regards controlling a qubit with a coherent field is studied in terms of degradation of the fidelity by employing a fully quantum mechanical treatment. While the fidelity error accompanied by pi/2 pulse control is shown to be inversely proportional to the average photon number in a way similar to that revealed by the Gea-Banacloche's results. Our results show that the error depends strongly on the initial state of the qubit. When the initial state of the qubit is in the ground state, the error is about 20 times smaller than that of the control started from the exited state, no matter how large N is. This dependency is explained in the context of an exact quantum mechanical description of the pulse area theorem. By using the result, the error accumulation tendency of successive pulse controls is found to be both non-linear and initial state-dependent.