UC San Diego

Quantum information science is a rapidly growing research area for that it provides new insights to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and offers a platform for the architecture of novel quantum technologies. The successfulness and practicality of this important scientific field rely on the controllability of a quantum system subject to a realistic noisy environment. The environment always leads to unintended dynamics of the system, and thus destroys its coherence and limits its applications. It is therefore important to understand these decoherence mechanisms from first principles, in order to minimize, or even remove, its adverse effect on the quantum system. The study of this open quantum system problem is usually based on some effective paradigms, where the environment is assumed to be "large", such that it can affect the quantum system without any back action. However, due to the demand for a high precision in quantum computation, such an approximate framework becomes questionable. We provide a new theoretical approach to treat this type of open quantum system problem, including the correlated dynamics between the system and the environment, by using a diagrammatic technique in the same spirit as the Keldysh non-equilibrium Green's function. In this formalism, both the environment and the photonic control are quantized. The dynamics of the system can be evaluated accurately for a time scale of small decoherence, but arbitrary quantum control, relevant to the need for quantum technologies. This offers a way of precise quantum noise calculations. We find how fundamental quantum correlations between the quantum control and quantum environment can arise, and are missing in the existing Master equation approximations. On the other hand, the study of the environment not only provides a better understanding of the decoherence, it also allows applicable designs of quantum operations between different qubit systems. In particular, we engineer a new protocol to entangle two qubits at a distance by projection measurements of their environments, the resonance fluorescence photons. We find exceptional improvements on the probability of success and the rate of entanglement based on the multiphoton environment approach, in comparison with the existing single photon entanglement scheme