Quantum control landscape for generation of $H$ and $T$ gates in an open qubit with both coherent and environmental drive

TL;DR

This paper investigates the quantum control landscape for generating $H$ and $T$ gates in an open qubit system using both coherent and environmental controls, revealing landscape features and solution structures.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of quantum control landscapes involving incoherent environmental control for $H$ and $T$ gates, highlighting landscape topology and solution submanifolds.

Findings

For $H$ gate, minimal infidelity distributions have a single peak.

For $T$ gate, distributions vary, with some showing two peaks indicating multiple minima.

Optimized solutions form submanifolds, sometimes with two isolated regions.

Abstract

An important problem in quantum computation is generation of single-qubit quantum gates such as Hadamard ($H$) and $\pi/8$ ($T$) gates which are components of a universal set of gates. Qubits in experimental realizations of quantum computing devices are interacting with their environment. While the environment is often considered as an obstacle leading to decrease of the gate fidelity, in some cases it can be used as a resource. Here we consider the problem of optimal generation of $H$ and $T$ gates using coherent control and the environment as a resource acting on the qubit via incoherent control. For this problem, we study quantum control landscape which represents the behaviour of the infidelity as a functional of the controls. We consider three landscapes, with infidelities defined by steering between two, three (via Goerz-Reich-Koch approach), and four matrices in the qubit Hilbert space. We observe that for the $H$ gate, which is Clifford gate, for all three infidelities the distributions of minimal values obtained with gradient search have a simple form with just one peak. However, for $T$ gate which is a non-Clifford gate, the situation is surprisingly different - this distribution for the infidelity defined by two matrices also has one peak, whereas distributions for the infidelities defined by three and four matrices have two peaks, that might indicate possible existence of two isolated minima in the control landscape. Important is that among these three infidelities only those defined with three and four matrices guarantee closeness of generated gate to a target and can be used as a good measure of closeness. We study sets of optimized solutions for this most general and not treated before case of coherent and incoherent controls acting together, and discover that they form submanifolds in the control space, and unexpected, in some cases two isolated submanifolds.