Protection of Logical Qubits via Optimal State Transfers

Abstract: Dynamical decoupling can enforce a symmetry on the dynamics of an open quantum system. Here we develop an efficient dynamical-decoupling-based strategy to create the decoherence-free subspaces (DFSs) for a set of qubits by optimally transferring the states of these qubits. We design to transfer the state of each qubit to all of the other qubits in an optimal and efficient manner, so as to produce an effective collective-type noise for all qubits. This collective pseudo-noise is essentially derived from arbitrarily independent real baths and needs only nearest-neighbor state transfers for its implementation. Moreover, our scheme requires only N steps to produce the effective collective-type noise for a system of N qubits. It provides an experimentally feasible and efficient approach to achieving the DFSs for encoding the protected logical qubits.