Quantum technology | EPFL Graph Search

Quantum technology is an emerging field of physics and engineering, encompassing technologies that rely on the properties of quantum mechanics, especially quantum entanglement, quantum superposition, and quantum tunneling. Quantum computing, sensors, cryptography, simulation, measurement, and imaging are all examples of emerging quantum technologies. The development of quantum technology also heavily impacts established fields such as space exploration. Secure communications Quantum communication Quantum secure communication is a method that is expected to be 'quantum safe' in the advent of quantum computing systems that could break current cryptography systems using methods such as Shor's algorithm. These methods include quantum key distribution (QKD), a method of transmitting information using entangled light in a way that makes any interception of the transmission obvious to the user. Another method is the quantum random number generator, which is capable of producing tr

Novel materials and algorithms for quantum technologies

Francesco Libbi

The enormous advancements in the ability to detect and manipulate single quantum states have lead to the emerging field of quantum technologies. Among these, quantum computation is the most far-reaching and challenging, aiming to solve problems that the classic computers could never address because of the exponential scaling, while quantum sensing exploits the ability to address single quantum states to realize ultra-sensitive and precise detectors. Defect centers in semiconductors play a primary role in these fields. The possibility to store information in the spin of their ground state, manipulate it through microwaves, and read it optically allows to use them as qubits. In addition, the very sharp dependence of their properties on temperature, strain and magnetic fields makes them very promising quantum sensors. In this Thesis we aim at contributing to the progress of quantum technologies both at the hardware and software level. From a hardware point of view, we study a key property of defect centers in semiconductors, the phonon-assisted luminescence, which can be measured to perform the readout of the information stored in a quantum bit, or to detect temperature variations. We predict the luminescence and study the exciton-phonon couplings within a rigorous many-body perturbation theory framework,an analysis that has never been performed for defect centers.In particular, we study the optical emission of the negatively-charged boron vacancy in 2D hexagonal boron nitride, which currently stands out among defect centers in 2D materials thanks to its promise for applications in quantum information and quantum sensing. We show that phonons are responsible for the observed luminescence, which otherwise would be dark due to symmetry. We also show that the symmetry breaking induced by the static Jahn-Teller effect is not able to describe the presence of the experimentally observed peak at 1.5 eV.The knowledge of the coupling between electrons and phonons is fundamental for the accurate prediction of all the features of the photoluminescence spectrum. However, the large number of atoms in a defect supercell hinders the possibility use density functional perturbation theory to study this coupling. In this work we present a finite-differences technique to calculate the electron-phonon matrix elements, which exploits the symmetries of the defect in such a way to use the very same set of displacement needed for the calculation of phonons. The computation of electron-phonon coupling thus becomes a simple post-processing of the finite-differences phonons calculation. On the quantum software side, we propose an improved quantum algorithm to calculate the Green's function through real-time propagation, and use it to compute the retarded Green's function for the 2-, 3- and 4-site Hubbard models. This novel protocol significantly reduces the number of controlled operations when compared to those previously suggested in literature. Such reduction is quite remarkable when considering the 2-site Hubbard model, for which we show that it is possible to obtain the exact time propagation of the

\ket{N\pm 1}

states by exponentiating one single Pauli component of the Hamiltonian, allowing us to perform the calculations on an actual superconducting quantum processor.

EPFL2022

Arnoldi-Lindblad time evolution: Faster-than-the-clock algorithm for the spectrum of time-independent and Floquet open quantum systems

Fabrizio Minganti

The characterization of open quantum systems is a central and recurring problem for the development of quantum technologies. For time-independent systems, an (often unique) steady state describes the average physics once all the transient processes have faded out, but interesting quantum properties can emerge at intermediate timescales. Given a Lindblad master equation, these properties are encoded in the spectrum of the Liouvillian whose diagonalization, however, is a challenge even for small-size quantum systems. Here, we propose a new method to efficiently provide the Liouvillian spectral decomposition. We call this method an Arnoldi-Lindblad time evolution, because it exploits the algebraic properties of the Liouvillian superoperator to efficiently construct a basis for the Arnoldi iteration problem. The advantage of our method is double: (i) It provides a faster-than-the-clock method to efficiently obtain the steady state, meaning that it produces the steady state through time evolution shorter than needed for the system to reach stationarity. (ii) It retrieves the low-lying spectral properties of the Liouvillian with a minimal overhead, allowing to determine both which quantum properties emerge and for how long they can be observed in a system. This method is general and model-independent, and lends itself to the study of large systems where the determination of the Liouvillian spectrum can be numerically demanding but the time evolution of the density matrix is still doable. Our results can be extended to time evolution with a time-dependent Liouvillian. In particular, our method works for Floquet (i.e., periodically driven) systems, where it allows not only to construct the Floquet map for the slow-decaying processes, but also to re- trieve the stroboscopic steady state and the eigenspectrum of the Floquet map. Although the method can be applied to any Lindbla- dian evolution (spin, fermions, bosons, ... ), for the sake of simplicity we demonstrate the efficiency of our method on several examples of coupled bosonic resonators (as a particular example). Our method outperforms other di- agonalization techniques and retrieves the Li- ouvillian low-lying spectrum even for system sizes for which it would be impossible to per- form exact diagonalization.

VEREIN FORDERUNG OPEN ACCESS PUBLIZIERENS QUANTENWISSENSCHAF2022

Non-classical photon-phonon correlations at room temperature

Santiago Tarrago Velez

With the development of quantum optics, photon correlations acquired a prominent role as a tool to test our understanding of physics, and played a key role in verifying the validity of quantum mechanics. The spatial and temporal correlations in a light field also reveal information about its origin, and allow us to probe the nature of the physical systems interacting with it. Additionally, with the advent of quantum technologies, they have acquired technological relevance, as they are expected to play an important role in quantum communication and quantum information processing.This thesis develops techniques that combine spontaneous Raman scattering with Time Correlated Single Photon Counting, and uses them to study the quantum mechanical nature of high frequency vibrations in crystals and molecules. We demonstrate photon bunching in the Stokes and anti-Stokes fields scattered from two ultrafast laser pulses, and use their cross-correlation to measure the 3.9 ps decay time of the optical phonon in diamond. We then employ this method to measure molecular vibrations in CS2, where we are able to excite the respective vibrational modes of the two isotopic species present in the sample in a coherent superposition, and observe quantum beating between the two signals. Stokes scattering, when combined with a projective measurement, leads to a well defined quantum state. We demonstrate this by measuring the second order correlation function of the anti-Stokes field conditional on detecting one or more photons in the Stokes field, which allows us to observe a phonon modeâs transition form a thermal state into the first excited Fock state, and measure its decay over the characteristic phonon lifetime. Finally, we use this technique to prepare a highly entangled photon-phonon state, which violates a Bell-type inequality. We measure S = 2.360 Â± 0.025, violating the CHSH inequality, compatible with the non-locality of the state.The techniques we developed open the door to the study of a broad range of physical systems, where spectroscopic information is obtained with the preparation of specific quantum states. They also hold potential for future technological use, and promote vibrational Raman scattering to a resource in nonlinear quantum optics -- where it used to be considered as a source of noise instead.

EPFL2021