Initialisation of single spin dressed states using shortcuts to adiabaticity

Johannes Kölbl, Arne Barfuss, Mark Kasperczyk, Lucas Thiel, Aashish Clerk, Hugo Ribeiro, Patrick Maletinsky

We demonstrate the use of shortcuts to adiabaticity protocols for initialisation, readout, 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 bi-directionality of the accelerated state transfer, which we employ for direct dressed state population readout 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.

Probing the Tavis-Cummings level splitting with intermediate-scale superconducting circuits

Ping Yang, Jan David Brehm, Juha Leppäkangas, Lingzhen Guo, Michael Marthaler, Isabella Boventer, Alexander Stehli, Tim Wolz, Alexey V. Ustinov, Martin Weides, et al.

We demonstrate the local control of up to eight two-level systems interacting strongly with a microwave cavity. Following calibration, the frequency of each individual two-level system (qubit) is tunable without influencing the others. Bringing the qubits one by one on resonance with the cavity, we observe the collective coupling strength of the qubit ensemble. The splitting scales up with the square root of the number of the qubits, being the hallmark of the Tavis-Cummings model. The local control circuitry causes a bypass shunting the resonator, and a Fano interference in the microwave readout, whose contribution can be calibrated away to recover the pure cavity spectrum. The simulator's attainable size of dressed states is limited by reduced signal visibility, and -if uncalibrated- by off-resonance shifts of sub-components. Our work demonstrates control and readout of quantum coherent mesoscopic multi-qubit system of intermediate scale under conditions of noise.

Reinforcement Learning with Neural Networks for Quantum Feedback

Thomas Fösel, Petru Tighineanu, Talitha Weiss, Florian Marquardt

Artificial neural networks are revolutionizing science. While the most prevalent technique involves supervised training on queries with a known correct answer, more advanced challenges often require discovering answers autonomously. In reinforcement learning, control strategies are improved according to a reward function. The power of this approach has been highlighted by spectactular recent successes, such as playing Go. So far, it has remained an open question whether neural-network-based reinforcement learning can be successfully applied in physics. Here, we show how to use this method for finding quantum feedback schemes, where a network-based "agent" interacts with and occasionally decides to measure a quantum system. We illustrate the utility by finding gate sequences that preserve the quantum information stored in a small collection of qubits against noise. This specific application will help to find hardware-adapted feedback schemes for small quantum modules while demonstrating more generally the promise of neural-network based reinforcement learning in physics.