Calculating the spatial structures of ion crystals is important in ion-trapped quantum computation. Here we demonstrate that the simulated annealing method is a powerful tool to evaluate the structures of ion crystals. By calculating equilibrium positions of 10 ions under harmonic potential and those of 120 ions under anharmonic potential, both with the standard procedure and simulated annealing method, we find that the standard procedure to evaluate spatial structures is complicated and may be inefficient in some cases, and that the simulated annealing method is more favorable.
The dynamical decoupling(DD) method is widely adopted to preserve coherence in different quantum systems. In the case of ideal pulses, its effects on the suppression of noise can be analytically described by the mathematical form of filter function. However, in practical experiments, the unavoidable pulse errors limit the efficiency of DD. In this paper,we study the effects of imperfect pulses on DD efficiency based on quantum trajectories. By directly generating a pseudo noise sequence correlated in time, we can explore the performance of DD with different pulse errors in the typical noise environment. It shows that, for the typical 1/f noise environment, the phase error of operational pulses severely affects the performance of noise suppression, while the detuning and intensity errors have less influence. Also, we get the thresholds of these errors for efficient DD under the given experimental conditions. Our method can be widely applied to guide practical DD experimental implementation.
We experimentally demonstrate the quantum anti-Zeno effect in a two-level system based on a single trapped ion ^(40)Ca^+. In the large detuning regime, we show that the transfer from the ground state to the excited state can be remarkably enhanced by the inserted projection measurements. The inserted measurements in our experiment are realized by the electron shelving technique. Compared to the ideal projection measurement, which makes the quantum state collapse instantaneously, a practical electron shelving process needs a finite time duration. The minimum time for this collapse process is shown to be inversely proportional to the square of the coupling strength between the measurement laser and the system.
We analyze the localization of quantum walks on a one-dimensional finite graph using vector-distance. We first vectorize the probability distribution of a quantum walker in each node. Then we compute out the probability distribution vectors of quantum walks in infinite and finite graphs in the presence of static disorder respectively, and get the distance between these two vectors. We find that when the steps taken are small and the boundary condition is tight, the localization between the infinite and finite cases is greatly different. However, the difference is negligible when the steps taken are large or the boundary condition is loose. It means quantum walks on a one-dimensional finite graph may also suffer from localization in the presence of static disorder. Our approach and results can be generalized to analyze the localization of quantum walks in higher-dimensional cases.
