Experimental bath engineering for quantitative studies of quantum control

Abstract

We develop and demonstrate a technique to engineer universal unitary baths in quantum systems. Using the correspondence between unitary decoherence due to ambient environmental noise and errors in a control system for quantum bits, we show how a wide variety of relevant classical error models may be realized through in-phase or in-quadrature modulation on a vector signal generator producing a resonant carrier signal. We demonstrate our approach through high-bandwidth modulation of the 12.6-GHz carrier appropriate for trapped 171Yb+ ions. Experiments demonstrate the reduction of coherent lifetime in the system in the presence of both engineered dephasing noise during free evolution and engineered amplitude noise during driven operations. In both cases, the observed reduction of coherent lifetimes matches well with quantitative models described herein. These techniques form the basis of a toolkit for quantitative tests of quantum control protocols, helping experimentalists characterize the performance of their quantum coherent systems.