Decoherence suppression for <i>N</i>-qubit states via weak measurement and environment-assisted measurement

Abstract

All open quantum systems are affected by environmental noises due to their interactions with the external environment and inevitably suffer from decoherence. Hence, it is fundamentally important and necessary to investigate decoherence suppression for open quantum systems via proper control strategies. Inspired by feed-forward control in the classical control theory, this paper proposes a novel decoherence suppression scheme via weak measurement and environment-assisted measurement. We first take the single-qubit system as an example to illustrate steps of the proposed scheme. To be specific, the single-qubit system is transferred to a state that is more robust to environmental noises via pre-weak measurement operators and feed-forward control operators before the decoherence channel, a measurement is performed on the environment coupled to the protected qubit during the decoherence channel, and the initial state is recovered via reversed feed-forward control operators and post-weak measurement operators after the decoherence channel. The optimum post-weak measurement strength is derived by setting the normalized final state equal to the initial state. By considering the optimum post-weak measurement strength, analytical formulas of the total success probability and the total fidelity are deduced. The proposed scheme is applicable for protecting quantum states from arbitrary decoherence channels with at least one invertible Kraus operator although only the amplitude damping channel and the phase damping channel are taken into account. Provided that the decay rate of the amplitude or phase damping channel is completely known, one can always achieve unit fidelity even for heavy damping cases, which is the biggest advantage of the proposed scheme. Influences of several parameters including strengths of weak measurements, the initial state and the decay rate of the decoherence channel on the performance of decoherence suppression are analyzed, and detailed procedures of a single-qubit pure and mixed state protection are presented on the Bloch sphere, respectively. Subsequently, the Kronecker product is employed to construct operators of dimension $2^N \times 2^N$, the proposed scheme is extended to the general $N$-qubit case, and unified analytical formulas of the total success probability and the total fidelity are deduced. By applying the proposed scheme to the protection of two-qubit entangled states, it is demonstrated that post-weak measurement operators are not necessary sometimes because of the particular structure of two-qubit entangled states. Furthermore, two numerical simulations are designed to enhance the concurrence of two-qubit entangled states and improve the average fidelity of the standard quantum teleportation in a noisy environment. Analytical formulas of the improvement of concurrence and the average teleportation fidelity are deduced, and the superiority of the proposed scheme is highlighted in comparison with unprotected scenarios.