Foundational Step Shows Quantum Computers Can Be Better Than the Sum of Their Parts

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Published: Monday, October 04 2021 10:46

Pobody’s nerfect—not even the indifferent, calculating bits that are the foundation of computers. But College Park Professor Christopher Monroe’s group, together with colleagues from Duke University, have made progress toward ensuring we can trust the results of quantum computers(link is external) even when they are built from pieces that sometimes fail. They have shown in an experiment, for the first time, that an assembly of quantum computing pieces can be better than the worst parts used to make it. In a paper published in the journal Nature(link is external) on Oct. 4, 2021, the team shared how they took this landmark step toward reliable, practical quantum computers.

In their experiment, the researchers combined several qubits—the quantum version of bits—so that they functioned together as a single unit called a logical qubit. They created the logical qubit based on a quantum error correction code so that, unlike for the individual physical qubits, errors can be easily detected and corrected, and they made it to be fault-tolerant—capable of containing errors to minimize their negative effects.

“Qubits composed of identical atomic ions are natively very clean by themselves,” says Monroe, who is also a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science. “However, at some point, when many qubits and operations are required, errors must be reduced further, and it is simpler to add more qubits and encode information differently. The beauty of error correction codes for atomic ions is they can be very efficient and can be flexibly switched on through software controls.”

This is the first time that a logical qubit has been shown to be more reliable than the most error-prone step required to make it. The team was able to successfully put the logical qubit into its starting state and measure it 99.4% of the time, despite relying on six quantum operations that are individually expected to work only about 98.9% of the time.A chip containing an ion trap that researchers use to capture and control atomic ion qubits (quantum bits). (Credit: Kai Hudek/JQI)

That might not sound like a big difference, but it’s a crucial step in the quest to build much larger quantum computers. If the six quantum operations were assembly line workers, each focused on one task, the assembly line would only produce the correct initial state 93.6% of the time (98.9% multiplied by itself six times)—roughly ten times worse than the error measured in the experiment. That improvement is because in the experiment the imperfect pieces work together to minimize the chance of quantum errors compounding and ruining the result, similar to watchful workers catching each other's mistakes.

The results were achieved using Monroe’s ion-trap system at UMD, which uses up to 32 individual charged atoms—ions—that are cooled with lasers and suspended over electrodes on a chip. They then use each ion as a qubit by manipulating it with lasers.

“We have 32 laser beams,” says Monroe. “And the atoms are like ducks in a row; each with its own fully controllable laser beam. I think of it like the atoms form a linear string and we're plucking it like a guitar string. We're plucking it with lasers that we turn on and off in a programmable way. And that's the computer; that's our central processing unit.”

By successfully creating a fault-tolerant logical qubit with this system, the researchers have shown that careful, creative designs have the potential to unshackle quantum computing from the constraint of the inevitable errors of the current state of the art. Fault-tolerant logical qubits are a way to circumvent the errors in modern qubits and could be the foundation of quantum computers that are both reliable and large enough for practical uses.

Correcting Errors and Tolerating Faults

Developing fault-tolerant qubits capable of error correction is important because Murphy’s law is relentless: No matter how well you build a machine, something eventually goes wrong. In a computer, any bit or qubit has some chance of occasionally failing at its job. And the many qubits involved in a practical quantum computer mean there are many opportunities for errors to creep in.

Fortunately, engineers can design a computer so that its pieces work together to catch errors—like keeping important information backed up to an extra hard drive or having a second person read your important email to catch typos before you send it. Both the people or the drives have to mess up for a mistake to survive. While it takes more work to finish the task, the redundancy helps ensure the final quality.

Some prevalent technologies, like cell phones and high-speed modems, currently use error correction to help ensure the quality of transmissions and avoid other inconveniences. Error correction using simple redundancy can decrease the chance of an uncaught error as long as your procedure isn’t wrong more often than it’s right—for example, sending or storing data in triplicate and trusting the majority vote can drop the chance of an error from one in a hundred to less than one in a thousand.

So while perfection may never be in reach, error correction can make a computer’s performance as good as required, as long as you can afford the price of using extra resources. Researchers plan to use quantum error correction to similarly complement their efforts to make better qubits and allow them to build quantum computers without having to conquer all the errors that quantum devices suffer from.

“What's amazing about fault tolerance, is it's a recipe for how to take small unreliable parts and turn them into a very reliable device,” says Kenneth Brown, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke and a coauthor on the paper. “And fault-tolerant quantum error correction will enable us to make very reliable quantum computers from faulty quantum parts.”

But quantum error correction has unique challenges—qubits are more complex than traditional bits and can go wrong in more ways. You can’t just copy a qubit, or even simply check its value in the middle of a calculation. The whole reason qubits are advantageous is that they can exist in a quantum superposition of multiple states and can become quantum mechanically entangled with each other. To copy a qubit you have to know exactly what information it’s currently storing—in physical terms you have to measure it. And a measurement puts it into a single well-defined quantum state, destroying any superposition or entanglement that the quantum calculation is built on.

So for quantum error correction, you must correct mistakes in bits that you aren’t allowed to copy or even look at too closely. It’s like proofreading while blindfolded. In the mid-1990s, researchers started proposing ways to do this using the subtleties of quantum mechanics, but quantum computers are just reaching the point where they can put the theories to the test.

The key idea is to make a logical qubit out of redundant physical qubits in a way that can check if the qubits agree on certain quantum mechanical facts without ever knowing the state of any of them individually.

Can’t Improve on the Atom

There are many proposed quantum error correction codes to choose from, and some are more natural fits for a particular approach to creating a quantum computer. Each way of making a quantum computer has its own types of errors as well as unique strengths. So building a practical quantum computer requires understanding and working with the particular errors and advantages that your approach brings to the table.

The ion trap-based quantum computer that Monroe and colleagues work with has the advantage that their individual qubits are identical and very stable. Since the qubits are electrically charged ions, each qubit can communicate with all the others in the line through electrical nudges, giving freedom compared to systems that need a solid connection to immediate neighbors.

“They’re atoms of a particular element and isotope so they're perfectly replicable,” says Monroe. “And when you store coherence in the qubits and you leave them alone, it exists essentially forever. So the qubit when left alone is perfect. To make use of that qubit, we have to poke it with lasers, we have to do things to it, we have to hold on to the atom with electrodes in a vacuum chamber, all of those technical things have noise on them, and they can affect the qubit.”

For Monroe’s system, the biggest source of errors is entangling operations—the creation of quantum links between two qubits with laser pulses. Entangling operations are necessary parts of operating a quantum computer and of combining qubits into logical qubits. So while the team can’t hope to make their logical qubits store information more stably than the individual ion qubits, correcting the errors that occur when entangling qubits is a vital improvement.

The researchers selected the Bacon-Shor code as a good match for the advantages and weaknesses of their system. For this project, they only needed 15 of the 32 ions that their system can support, and two of the ions were not used as qubits but were only needed to get an even spacing between the other ions. For the code, they used nine qubits to redundantly encode a single logical qubit and four additional qubits to pick out locations where potential errors occurred. With that information, the detected faulty qubits can, in theory, be corrected without the “quantum-ness” of the qubits being compromised by measuring the state of any individual qubit.

“The key part of quantum error correction is redundancy, which is why we needed nine qubits in order to get one logical qubit,” says Laird Egan (PhD, '21), who is the first author of the paper. “But that redundancy helps us look for errors and correct them, because an error on a single qubit can be protected by the other eight.”

The team successfully used the Bacon-Shor code with the ion-trap system. The resulting logical qubit required six entangling operations—each with an expected error rate between 0.7% and 1.5%. But thanks to the careful design of the code, these errors don't combine into an even higher error rate when the entanglement operations were used to prepare the logical qubit in its initial state.

The team only observed an error in the qubit's preparation and measurement 0.6% of the time—less than the lowest error expected for any of the individual entangling operations. The team was then able to move the logical qubit to a second state with an error of just 0.3%. The team also intentionally introduced errors and demonstrated that they could detect them.

“This is really a demonstration of quantum error correction improving performance of the underlying components for the first time,” says Egan. “And there's no reason that other platforms can't do the same thing as they scale up. It's really a proof of concept that quantum error correction works.”

As the team continues this line of work, they say they hope to achieve similar success in building even more challenging quantum logical gates out of their qubits, performing complete cycles of error correction where the detected errors are actively corrected, and entangling multiple logical qubits together.

“Up until this paper, everyone's been focused on making one logical qubit,” says Egan. “And now that we’ve made one, we're like, ‘Single logical qubits work, so what can you do with two?’”

Original story by Bailey Bedford: https://jqi.umd.edu/news/foundational-step-shows-quantum-computers-can-be-better-sum-their-parts

In addition to Monroe, Brown and Egan, the coauthors of the paper are Marko Cetina, Andrew Risinger, Daiwei Zhu, Debopriyo Biswas, Dripto M. Debroy, Crystal Noel, Michael Newman and  Muyuan Li.

New Approach to Information Transfer Reaches Quantum Speed Limit

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Published: Wednesday, August 04 2021 14:01

Neuromorphics for Network Discovery

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Published: Wednesday, July 21 2021 05:33

From neurons connected by axons to Facebook profiles connected by friendships, interaction networks lie all around us. In new work recently published in Physical Review X, Amitava Banerjee, Joseph D. Hart, Rajarshi Roy and Edward Ott  applied machine learning tools to formulate and test a new approach to working out such interaction networks solely from the data of their observed behavior over time.

To do so, the researchers trained an artificial neural network to mimic the observed time evolution of the unknown system. They then tracked the spread of disturbances in that trained neural nSchematics of the RC trained for predicting the time series k time steps ahead. Lower: the four time series represent scalar components of X[t].etwork and used that information to infer the network structure of the original system. The method is particularly suited for the common but hard-to-solve situations—where the network dynamics are noisy, and the cause-and-effect interactions are time-lagged. The team also tested this technique on experimental and computer-simulated data from opto-electronic networks—an excellent testbed for complex dynamics—and showed that the technique is extremely effective. Determining the underlying interaction network is a key step towards understanding, predicting, and controlling the behavior of many complex dynamical systems. As such, this method offers the promise of widespread future impact for the study of networks and dynamics.

To read more, see the paper  "Machine Learning Link Inference of Noisy Delay-coupled Networks with Opto-Electronic Experimental Tests", in Phys. Rev. X 11, 031014. 

Unconventional Superconductor Acts the Part of a Promising Quantum Computing Platform

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Published: Thursday, July 15 2021 14:01

Scientists on the hunt for an unconventional kind of superconductor have produced the most compelling evidence to date that they’ve found one. In a pair of papers, researchers at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Quantum Materials Center (QMC) and colleagues have shown that uranium ditelluride (or UTe₂ for short) displays many of the hallmarks of a topological superconductor—a material that may unlock new ways to build quantum computers and other futuristic devices.

“Nature can be wicked,” says Johnpierre Paglione, a professor of physics at UMD, the director of QMC and senior author on one of the papers. “There could be other reasons we're seeing all this wacky stuff, but honestly, in my career, I've never seen anything like it.”

All superconductors carry electrical currents without any resistance. It’s kind of their thing. The wiring behind your walls can’t rival this feat, which is one of many reasons that large coils of superconducting wires and not normal copper wires have been used in MRI machines and other scientific equipment for decades.Crystals of a promising topological superconductor grown by researchers at the University of Maryland’s Quantum Materials Center. (Credit: Sheng Ran/NIST).

But superconductors achieve their super-conductance in different ways. Since the early 2000s, scientists have been looking for a special kind of superconductor, one that relies on an intricate choreography of the subatomic particles that actually carry its current.

This choreography has a surprising director: a branch of mathematics called topology. Topology is a way of grouping together shapes that can be gently transformed into one another through pushing and pulling. For example, a ball of dough can be shaped into a loaf of bread or a pizza pie, but you can’t make it into a donut without poking a hole in it. The upshot is that, topologically speaking, a loaf and a pie are identical, while a donut is different. In a topological superconductor, electrons perform a dance around each other while circling something akin to the hole in the center of a donut.

Unfortunately, there’s no good way to slice a superconductor open and zoom in on these electronic dance moves. At the moment, the best way to tell whether or not electrons are boogieing on an abstract donut is to observe how a material behaves in experiments. Until now, no superconductor has been conclusively shown to be topological, but the new papers show that UTe2 looks, swims and quacks like the right kind of topological duck.

One study, by Paglione’s team in collaboration with the group of Aharon Kapitulnik at Stanford University, reveals that not one but two kinds of superconductivity exist simultaneously in UTe2. Using this result, as well as the way light is altered when it bounces off the material (in addition to previously published experimental evidence), they were able to narrow down the types of superconductivity that are present to two options, both of which theorists believe are topological.  They published their findings on July 15, 2021, in the journal Science.

In another study, a team led by Steven Anlage, a professor of physics at UMD and a member of QMC, revealed unusual behavior on the surface of the same material. Their findings are consistent with the long-sought-after phenomenon of topologically protected Majorana modes. Majorana modes, exotic particles that behave a bit like half of an electron, are predicted to arise on the surface of topological superconductors. These particles particularly excite scientists because they might be a foundation for robust quantum computers. Anlage and his team reported their results in a paper published May 21, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications.

Superconductors only reveal their special characteristics below a certain temperature, much like water only freezes below zero Celsius. In normal superconductors, electrons pair up into a two-person conga line, following each other through the metal. But in some rare cases, the electron couples perform a circular dance around each other, more akin to a waltz. The topological case is even more special—the circular dance of the electrons contains a vortex, like the eye amidst the swirling winds of a hurricane. Once electrons pair up in this way, the vortex is hard to get rid of, which is what makes a topological superconductor distinct from one with a simple, fair-weather electron dance.

Back in 2018, Paglione’s team, in collaboration with the team of Nicholas Butch, an adjunct associate professor of physics at UMD and a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), unexpectedly discovered that UTe2 was a superconductor. Right away, it was clear that it wasn’t your average superconductor. Most notably, it seemed unphased by large magnetic fields, which normally destroy superconductivity by splitting up the electron dance couples. This was the first clue that the electron pairs in UTe2 hold onto each other more tightly than usual, likely because their paired dance is circular. This garnered a lot of interest and further research from others in the field.

“It's kind of like a perfect storm superconductor,” says Anlage. “It's combining a lot of different things that no one's ever seen combined before.”

In the new Science paper, Paglione and his collaborators reported two new measurements that reveal the internal structure of UTe2. The UMD team measured the material’s specific heat, which characterizes how much energy it takes to heat it up by one degree. They measured the specific heat at different starting temperatures and watched it change as the sample became superconducting.

“Normally there's a big jump in specific heat at the superconducting transition,” says Paglione. “But we see that there's actually two jumps. So that's evidence of actually two superconducting transitions, not just one. And that's highly unusual.”

The two jumps suggested that electrons in UTe2 can pair up to perform either of two distinct dance patterns.

In a second measurement, the Stanford team shone laser light onto a piece of UTe2 and noticed that the light reflecting back was a bit twisted. If they sent in light bobbing up and down, the reflected light bobbed mostly up and down but also a bit left and right. This meant something inside the superconductor was twisting up the light and not untwisting it on its way out.

Kapitulnik’s team at Stanford also found that a magnetic field could coerce UTe2 into twisting light one way or the other. If they applied a magnetic field pointing up as the sample became superconducting, the light coming out would be tilted to the left. If they pointed the magnetic field down, the light tilted to the right. This told that researchers that, for the electrons dancing inside the sample, there was something special about the up and down directions of the crystal.

To sort out what all this meant for the electrons dancing in the superconductor, the researchers enlisted the help of Daniel F. Agterberg, a theorist and professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a co-author of the Science paper. According to the theory, the way uranium and tellurium atoms are arranged inside the UTe2 crystal allows electron couples to team up in eight different dance configurations. Since the specific heat measurement shows that two dances are going on at the same time, Agterberg enumerated all the different ways to pair these eight dances together. The twisted nature of the reflected light and the coercive power of a magnetic field along the up-down axis cut the possibilities down to four. Previous results showing the robustness of UTe2’s superconductivity under large magnetic fields further constrained it to only two of those dance pairs, both of which form a vortex and indicate a stormy, topological dance.

“What's interesting is that given the constraints of what we've seen experimentally, our best theory points to a certainty that the superconducting state is topological,” says Paglione.

If the nature of superconductivity in a material is topological, the resistance will still go to zero in the bulk of the material, but on the surface something unique will happen: Particles, known as Majorana modes, will appear and form a fluid that is not a superconductor. These particles also remain on the surface despite defects in the material or small disruptions from the environment. Researchers have proposed that, thanks to the unique properties of these particles, they might be a good foundation for quantum computers. Encoding a piece of quantum information into several Majoranas that are far apart makes the information virtually immune to local disturbances that, so far, have been the bane of quantum computers.

Anlage’s team wanted to probe the surface of UTe2 more directly to see if they could spot signatures of this Majorana sea. To do that, they sent microwaves towards a chunk UTe2, and measured the microwaves that came out on the other side. They compared the output with and without the sample, which allowed them to test properties of the bulk and the surface simultaneously.

The surface leaves an imprint on the strength of the microwaves, leading to an output that bobs up and down in sync with the input, but slightly subdued. But since the bulk is a superconductor, it offers no resistance to the microwaves and doesn’t change their strength. Instead, it slows them down, causing delays that make the output bob up and down out of sync with the input. By looking at the out-of-sync parts of the response, the researchers determined how many of the electrons inside the material participate in the paired dance at various temperatures. They found that the behavior agreed with the circular dances suggested by Paglione’s team.

­­­Perhaps more importantly, the in-sync part of the microwave response showed that the surface of UTe2 isn’t superconducting. This is unusual, since superconductivity is usually contagious: Putting a regular metal close to a superconductor spreads superconductivity to the metal. But the surface of UTe2 didn’t seem to catch superconductivity from the bulk—just as expected for a topological superconductor—and instead responded to the microwaves in a way that hasn’t been seen before.

“The surface behaves differently from any superconductor we've ever looked at,” Anlage says. “And then the question is ‘What's the interpretation of that anomalous result?’ And one of the interpretations, which would be consistent with all the other data, is that we have this topologically protected surface state that is kind of like a wrapper around the superconductor that you can't get rid of.”

It might be tempting to conclude that the surface of UTe2 is covered with a sea of Majorana modes and declare victory. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Anlage and his group have tried to come up with every possible alternative explanation for what they were observing and systematically ruled them out, from oxidization on the surface to light hitting the edges of the sample. Still, it is possible a surprising alternative explanation is yet to be discovered.

“In the back of your head you're always thinking ‘Oh, maybe it was cosmic rays’, or ‘Maybe it was something else,’” says Anlage. “You can never 100% eliminate every other possibility.”

For Paglione’s part, he says the smoking gun will be nothing short of using surface Majorana modes to perform a quantum computation. However, even if the surface of UTe2 truly has a bunch of Majorana modes, there’s currently no straightforward way to isolate and manipulate them. Doing so might be more practical with a thin film of UTe2 instead of the (easier to produce) crystals that were used in these recent experiments.

“We have some proposals to try to make thin films,” Paglione says. “Because it's uranium and it's radioactive, it requires some new equipment. The next task would be to actually try to see if we can grow films. And then the next task would be to try to make devices. So that would require several years, but it's not crazy.”

Whether UTe2 proves to be the long-awaited topological superconductor or just a pigeon that learned to swim and quack like a duck, both Paglione and Anlage are excited to keep finding out what the material has in store.

“It's pretty clear though that there's a lot of cool physics in the material,” Anlage says. “Whether or not it’s Majoranas on the surface is certainly a consequential issue, but it's exploring novel physics which is the most exciting stuff.”

Story by Dina Genkina

Special thanks to Jay Sau, a professor of physics at UMD and a JQI Fellow, for helpful discussions while reporting this story.

In addition to Paglione, Kapitulnik, Anlage, Butch and Agterberg, the teams included Seokjin Bae, a former graduate student in physics at UMD who is now a postdoctoral researcher at University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne; Hyunsoo Kim, a former assistant research scientist at UMD who is now an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Texas Tech University; Yun Suk Eo, a postdoctoral researcher at UMD; Sheng Ran, a former postdoctoral researcher at UMD and NIST who is now an assistant professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis; I-lin Liu, a postdoctoral researcher at UMD and NIST; Wesley T. Fuhrman, a former research scientist at UMD and NIST; Ian M. Hayes, a postdoctoral researcher at UMD; Di S. Wei, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials; Tristin Metz, a graduate student in physics at UMD; Jian Zhang, a graduate student in physics at the State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics at Fudan University; Shanta R. Saha, an associate research scientist at UMD and NIST; and John Collini, a graduate student in physics at UMD.

Bae, S., Kim, H., Eo, Y.S. et al. Anomalous normal fluid response in a chiral superconductor UTe2. Nat Commun 12, 2644 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22906-6

Time Delay Acquires a New Dimension

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Published: Wednesday, May 19 2021 12:33

Physicists love to do scattering experiments.  When they are trying to figure out a new force of nature, or discover a new particle, they fire up the accelerator and shoot tiny particles at their target, and measure what comes out.  Usually they carefully measure the energy and momentum of the incident and exiting particles, and try to learn about what took place in the target from that.  All of this information is summarized in an elegant quantity known as the Scattering Matrix. 

Schematic of time delay for scattering of a wave packet from a real-life ray-chaotic billiard. The symmetric and smooth wave packet goes in to the scattering region through one scattering channel and emerges later from another channel as a delayed and strongly distorted pulse. The complex time delay accounts for these changes.

Less studied is the question of how long the particle lingers in the interaction region before coming out.  This quantity is called time delay, and it has been studied since the early days of nuclear physics.  However, time delay never graduated from the confines of its original home, namely relatively simple quantum mechanical settings where the corrupting influences of “dissipation,” “de-coherence” and “dephasing” do not come into play.  Because of the rather restrictive conditions under which time delay was originally defined, it has always been taken to be a real, and generally positive, number.  In a paper published on May 18, 2021 in Physical Review E, Lei Chen, Steve Anlage,Illustration of complex time delay associated with a single resonant mode of a complex scattering system known as a quantum graph. Shown is the evolution of the complex time delay as a function of frequency near the resonance, illustrating how the real and imaginary parts of the time delay form a closed figure in the complex time-delay plane. The cases of two resonances, one with small loss and another with large loss, are shown for illustration. These results are from a simulation of the quantum graph. and Yan V. Fyodorov describe having generalized this time delay to real-world situations where there is dissipation and de-phasing, and created a very useful complex version of time delay.  This generalized time delay has a real part that can be positive or negative, and an imaginary part, which can also have either sign. 

The real part still tells something about the lingering time of the particle, but the imaginary part conveys how much the waves that describe the particle quantum mechanically are distorted by the lossy and disruptive scattering system.  This new quantity gives tremendous insights into the microscopic physics of the scattering system by cleverly encoding information about locations of the poles (infinities) and zeros of the scattering matrix.  Knowing all of those locations is equivalent to knowing essentially everything there is to know about the scattering process.  The exciting thing is that now complex time delay can be used to uncover fundamental properties of scattering systems that arise not just in quantum physics, but also in electromagnetic and acoustic reverberant systems, and the world of the small, but not too small, called mesoscopic physics.

More recently, in a paper published on November 12, 2021 in Physical Review Letters, the same authors have applied their generalized time delay concept to complex scattering systems with many overlapping resonances and zeros.  By looking at the statistical properties of the time delays, they utilized concepts from random matrix theory to reveal information about the distribution of poles in the complex frequency plane.  This deepens the understanding of a broad variety of complicated wave scattering systems, and provides a quantitative tool to characterize and classify them.

To read more, see the paper  "Generalization of Wigner time delay to subunitary scattering systems", in the 1 May 2021 issue of Physical Review E (Vol. 103, No. 5): https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.103.L050203
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.103.L050203

And the follow-up paper “Statistics of Complex Wigner Time Delays as a counter of S-matrix poles: Theory and Experiment,” in the 12 November 2021 issue of Physical Review Letters (Vol. 127, No. 20): https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.204101
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.204101