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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 271 records · Page 15
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Designing an exciton-condensate Josephson junction in quantum Hall heterostructures

The exciton condensate, a counterpart of superconductors realized in two-dimensional quantum Hall bilayer systems, has yet to demonstrate definitive experimental evidence of phase coherence such as the Josephson effect. This work introduces a gate-defined Josephson junction designed to exhibit the in-plane Josephson effect in van der Waals heterostructures. Unlike superconducting S-I-S junctions, the proposed device leverages a nearly layer-polarized gated region to mediate Josephson coupling via layer pseudospin variation. This coupling mechanism is tunable through gate voltages and magnetic fields, offering a high degree of experimental control. We demonstrate the feasibility of the design using realistic parameters, paving the way for direct observation of excitonic phase coherence in clean quantum Hall systems.

Wang, Tianle↗
DOE OSTI2026

Diagonal state designs with reconfigurable real-time circuits

Unitary designs are widely used in quantum computation, but in many practical settings it suffices to construct a diagonal state design generated with unitary gates diagonal in the computational basis. In this work, we introduce a simple and efficient diagonal state 3-design based on real-time evolutions under 2-local Hamiltonians. Our construction is inspired by the classical Girard-Hutchinson trace estimator in that it involves the stochastic preparation of many random-phase states. Though the exact Girard-Hutchinson states are not tractably implementable on a quantum computer, we can construct states that match the statistical moments of the Girard-Hutchinson states with real-time evolution. Importantly, our random states are all generated using the same Hamiltonians for real-time evolution, with the randomness arising solely from stochastic variations in the durations of the evolutions. In this sense, the circuit is fully reconfigurable and thus suited for near-term realizations on both digital and analog platforms. Moreover, we show how to extend our construction to achieve diagonal state designs of arbitrarily high order.

Shen, Yizhi [LBL, Berkeley] (ORCID:000000024160548↗
DOE OSTI2026

Fast Sideband Control of a Multimode Cavity Memory with Weak Dispersive Coupling to a Transmon

Mitigating ancilla-mediated error channels is a critical challenge in controlling high-quality superconducting cavities using circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED). We address this by weakening the dispersive coupling while demonstrating fast, high-fidelity multimode control through transmon-mediated sideband interactions. We implement transmon-cavity SWAP gates with speeds up to 30 times larger than the bare dispersive coupling. Combined with transmon rotations, this enables universal state preparation in a single mode, though achieving unitary gates and extending control to multiple modes remains a challenge. In this work, we overcome this limitation by introducing two control strategies: (i) a shelving technique that stores populations in sideband-transparent states, and (ii) a method that exploits the dispersive shift to implement photon-number-selective transmon-cavity SWAP gates. We use these protocols to prepare Fock and binomial code states across any of the ten modes of a multimode cavity with millisecond coherence times—serving as a multimode quantum memory. We demonstrate unitaries that encode and decode an arbitrary qubit state from the transmon into corresponding vacuum and Fock state superpositions, as well as entangled NOON states of cavity mode pairs—a scheme extendable to arbitrary multimode Fock encodings in the cavity modes. Furthermore, we implement a new binomial encoding gate that converts arbitrary transmon superpositions into binomial code states in any cavity mode at a rate exceeding the dispersive shifts in our system, achieving an average post-selected state fidelity of 96.3% in a 4 μ⁢s gate time. By using precalibrated transmon and sideband pulses, our work demonstrates multimode control with significantly reduced calibration overhead, enabling efficient unitary operations using sideband interactions in multimode cQED systems.

Huang, Jordan [Rutgers Univ., Piscataway, NJ (Unit↗
DOE OSTI2024

Ultrafast creation of a light-induced semimetallic state in strongly excited 1T-TiSe 2

Screening, a ubiquitous phenomenon associated with the shielding of electric fields by surrounding charges, has been widely adopted as a means to modify a material’s properties. While most studies have relied on static changes of screening through doping or gating thus far, here we demonstrate that screening can also drive the onset of distinct quantum states on the ultrafast timescale. By using time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we show that intense optical excitation can drive 1T-TiSe 2 , a prototypical charge density wave material, almost instantly from a gapped into a semimetallic state. By systematically comparing changes in band structure over time and excitation strength with theoretical calculations, we find that the appearance of this state is likely caused by a dramatic reduction of the screening length. In summary, this work showcases how optical excitation enables the screening-driven design of a nonequilibrium semimetallic phase in TiSe 2 , possibly providing a general pathway into highly screened phases in other strongly correlated materials.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Scalable stable comb-to-tone integrated RF photonic drive for superconducting qubits

The recent advent of quantum computing has the potential to overhaul security, communications, and scientific modeling. Superconducting qubits are a leading platform that is advancing noise-tolerant intermediate-scale quantum processors. The implementation requires scaling to large numbers of superconducting qubits, circuit depths, and gate speeds, wherein high-purity RF signal generation and effective cabling transport are desirable. Fiber photonic-enhanced RF signal generation has demonstrated the principle of addressing both signal generation and transport requirements, supporting intermediate qubit numbers and robust packaging efforts; however, fiber-based approaches to RF signal distribution are often bounded by their phase instability. Here, we present a silicon photonic integrated circuit-based version of a photonic-enhanced RF signal generator that demonstrates the requisite stability, as well as a path towards the necessary signal fidelity.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2026

Sparse Phase Ansatzes for Resource-Efficient Qudit State Preparation via the SNAP-Displacement Protocol

Efficient preparation of nonclassical bosonic states is a central requirement for quantum computing, simulation, and precision metrology. We study resource-efficient quantum state preparation in bosonic qudit systems using the SNAP-displacement (SD) protocol. Existing SD-based approaches typically require a large number of gates and SNAP phases, resulting in complex control pulses with longer ansatz durations and amplified impact of photon-loss and control errors. In this work, we focus on the near- to medium-term regime, in which noisy quantum devices impose trade-offs on the fidelity that can be achieved, which must be taken into account. Specifically, we propose to optimize only a subset of the SNAP phases and introduce three progressively more general sparse ansatzes. To provide fine-grained control and identify the most suitable ansatz for a given target fidelity, we further employ a scalarized multi-objective optimization that trades off fidelity against either the number of phases or the duration of the ansatz. Numerical results for several target states and qudit dimensions up to $d=64$, evaluated through the hypervolume of the Pareto frontiers, show that these sparse ansatzes achieve favorable trade-offs over the fully parameterized SD protocol in both ideal and noisy settings. The advantage is strongest and most consistent when minimizing the number of phases, while improvements in ansatz duration are smaller and more dependent on the target-state family and noise level, suggesting a practical route to more efficient near- and medium-term bosonic state preparation.

Ferrari Dacrema, Maurizio [Milan Polytechnic] (ORC↗
DOE OSTI2025

Leveraging Hamiltonian simulation techniques to compile operations on bosonic devices

Circuit quantum electrodynamics enables the combined use of qubits and oscillator modes. Despite a variety of available gate sets, many hybrid qubit-boson (i.e. qubit-oscillator) operations are realizable only through optimal control theory, which is oftentimes intractable and uninterpretable. We introduce an analytic approach with rigorously proven error bounds for realizing specific classes of operations via two matrix product formulas commonly used in Hamiltonian simulation, the Lie–Trotter–Suzuki and Baker–Campbell–Hausdorff product formulas. We show how this technique can be used to realize a number of operations of interest, including polynomials of annihilation and creation operators, namely (a) p (a † ) q for integer p, q. We show examples of this paradigm including obtaining universal control within a subspace of the entire Fock space of an oscillator, state preparation of a fixed photon number in the cavity, simulation of the Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonian, and simulation of the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect. This work demonstrates how techniques from Hamiltonian simulation can be applied to better control hybrid qubit-boson devices.

bosonic qubits↗
NASA NTRS2001

Nano-Transistor Modeling: Two Dimensional Green's Function Method

Two quantum mechanical effects that impact the operation of nanoscale transistors are inversion layer energy quantization and ballistic transport. While the qualitative effects of these features are reasonably understood, a comprehensive study of device physics in two dimensions is lacking. Our work addresses this shortcoming and provides: (a) a framework to quantitatively explore device physics issues such as the source-drain and gate leakage currents, DIBL (Drain Induced Barrier Lowering), and threshold voltage shift due to quantization, and b) a means of benchmarking quantum corrections to semiclassical models (such as density-gradient and quantum-corrected MEDICI).

Svizhenko, Alexei↗
DOE OSTI2024

Quantum Circuit Partitioning for Scalable Noise-Aware Quantum Circuit Re-Synthesis

Re-synthesis techniques are utilized to optimize the quantum circuit. To enable scalable re-synthesis a divide-and-conquer approach is adopted that partitions the circuit into smaller blocks, which are optimized independently. Several algorithms have been proposed to minimize the block number while maximizing the gate count of each block. However, they vary in their performance and may not yield the highest output fidelity. We propose a reinforcement learning-based quantum circuit partitioning framework that incorporates the physical properties of the quantum hardware to maximize the output fidelity post-quantum circuit optimization. To accelerate the training, we also propose a noise injection method that enables on-the-fly optimization in the reinforcement learning environment, independent of the adopted optimization/re-synthesis method at the block level. We evaluate our approach compared to different partitioning techniques using various quantum benchmarks executed on IBM Q Hanoi quantum computer.

Charrwi, Mohammad Walid↗
DOE OSTI2026

Concatenated dual displacement code for continuous-variable quantum error correction

The continuous-variable (CV) Gaussian no-go theorem fundamentally limits the suppression of Gaussian displacement errors using only Gaussian gates and states. Prior studies have employed Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states as ancillary qumodes to suppress small Gaussian displacement errors. However, when the displacement magnitude becomes large, inevitable lattice-crossing errors arise beyond the correctable range of the GKP state. To address this issue, we concatenate the Gaussian-noise-suppression circuit with an outer analog Steane code that corrects such occasional lattice-crossing events as well as other abrupt displacement errors. Contrary to conventional concatenation, which primarily aims to reduce logical error rates, the Steane-GKP duality in encoding provides complementary protection against displacement errors at different scales: The inner GKP layer employs non-Gaussian resources to suppress continuous Gaussian noise and reduce residual variance, while the outer analog Steane code corrects discrete lattice-crossing events that exceed the GKP correctable range. It is precisely this separation of error-mitigation roles that enables CV error correction. In contrast to prior work on concatenating GKP and repetition codes to establish error correction for discrete qubit/qudit encoding, we provide correction in the continuous encoding space. Analytical studies show that, under infinite squeezing, the concatenated code suppresses the variance of Gaussian displacement errors acting on all qumodes by up to 50%, while enabling unbiased correction of lattice-crossing errors with a success probability determined by the ratio between the residual Gaussian error standard deviation and the lattice-crossing magnitude. Even with finite squeezing, the proposed architecture still provides Gaussian-error suppression and lattice-crossing correction. Moreover, the presence of the outer analog Steane code relaxes the squeezing requirement of the inner GKP states, indicating near-term experimental feasibility. This work establishes a viable route toward fault-tolerant continuous-variable quantum computation and provides insight into the design of concatenated CV error-correcting architectures.

quantum error correction↗
DOE OSTI2026

High-fidelity entanglement and coherent multi-qubit mapping in an atom array

Neutral atoms in optical tweezer arrays possess broad applicability for quantum technologies, such as computing, analogue simulation and metrology. The atomic species ytterbium-171 is able to host multiple types of qubits, making it a strong candidate for bridging various applications of tweezer arrays. Realizing this potential requires high-fidelity generation and transfer of many-body entanglement between these distinct qubit degrees of freedom. Here, in this study, we demonstrate the creation and coherent mapping of entangled quantum states across multiple qubits in ytterbium-171 tweezer arrays. We map entangled states onto the optical clock qubit from the nuclear spin qubit or the Rydberg qubit. We coherently transfer Z 2 -ordered Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger states of up to 20 atoms from the interacting Rydberg manifold to the metastable nuclear spin manifold. Furthermore, we find that clock-qubit-based spin detection, when applied to Rydberg and nuclear spin qubits, facilitates atom-loss-detectable qubit measurements and Rydberg decay detection. This enables delayed-erasure detection, yielding an error-detected two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.78(4)% in metastable qubits. These results establish a versatile architecture that advances multiple fields of quantum information science while also establishing bridges between them.

Senoo, Aruku [University of Colorado, Boulder, CO ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Instability of steady-state mixed-state symmetry-protected topological order to strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking

Recent experimental progress in controlling open quantum systems enables the pursuit of mixed-state nonequilibrium quantum phases. We investigate whether open quantum systems hosting mixed-state symmetry-protected topological states as steady states retain this property under symmetric perturbations. Focusing on the decohered cluster state – a mixed-state symmetry-protected topological state protected by a combined strong and weak symmetry – we construct a parent Lindbladian that hosts it as a steady state. This Lindbladian can be mapped onto exactly solvable reaction-diffusion dynamics, even in the presence of certain perturbations, allowing us to solve the parent Lindbladian in detail and reveal previously-unknown steady states. Using both analytical and numerical methods, we find that typical symmetric perturbations cause strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking at arbitrarily small perturbations, destabilize the steady-state mixed-state symmetry-protected topological order. However, when perturbations introduce only weak symmetry defects, the steady-state mixed-state symmetry-protected topological order remains stable. Additionally, we construct a quantum channel which replicates the essential physics of the Lindbladian and can be efficiently simulated using only Clifford gates, Pauli measurements, and feedback.

Shah, Jeet [University of Maryland, College Park, ↗
NASA NTRS1997

Computer-aided design of a proton pump

The use of transmembrane proton gradients in energy transduction is an almost universal feature of life on earth. These proton gradients are established and maintained by specialized assemblies of proteins which actively pump protons across membranes. One broad class of proton pumps uses captured light energy to drive the proton pumping. Our goal is to elucidate the minimum structural requirements of a light-driven proton-pump. There are two basic components to a simple light-driven proton pump: a source of photo-generated protons and a "gate-keeper" which prevents these protons from reattaching themselves to their source. A wide variety of molecules in the membrane, even as simple as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are capable of releasing protons when illuminated. Our work is therefore focused on the design of the "gate-keeper." Our initial model involves a pair of proton acceptors, coupled to each other by a transient water bridge, and supported in the membrane by a small bundle of peptide helices. Upon illumination, the proton source transfers its proton to the:- first acceptor of the gate-keeper. While the reverse reaction is highly probable, all that is needed to ensure irreversibility is a nonvanishing probability that the proton will be transferred to the second acceptor across a transient water bridge. Back transfer of the proton to the first acceptor, and thence to the proton source, is impeded by the free energy required to move the proton uphill towards the. proton source and by the disruption of the transient water bridge. As a prototypical water-bridged proton transfer system, we are studying the transfer of a proton across a water bridge from a formic acid to a formate anion. With a pK(sub alpha), of 3.7. formic acid is a good model for the acidic amino acids glutamate and aspartate which are good candidates for gate-keeper proton acceptors. Simulations of proton transfer reactions in a membrane are complicated by the quantum mechanical nature of the process breaking and forming chemical bonds.

New, Michael H.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Resolving the phase of Fano resonance wave packets with photoelectron frequency-resolved optical gating

The creation of structured electronic wave packets (EWPs) energetically close to Fano resonances has been achieved with ultrafast extreme ultraviolet coherent light sources. However, direct real-time observations of EWP evolution and full reconstructions of the quantum properties of EWPs, including both amplitude and phase, are lacking. Here we introduce and demonstrate a comprehensive approach for the direct measurement and complete characterization of structured EWPs created within a prototypical Fano resonance. Because of its analogy with frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), we named the method photoelectron FROG. The correlated EWP is initiated by a carefully engineered extreme UV pump pulse. A weak near-infrared laser field, serving as a probe pulse, samples the evolution of the EWPs in the time domain, as well as in the frequency domain. The amplitude and phase of the EWPs are obtained via a time-dependent reconstruction algorithm based on a short-time Fourier transformation. Given the excellent agreement between our experimental results and time-dependent reconstructions, we expect this method to be broadly applicable to the study of ultrafast processes, especially electronic ones, in complex systems, as well as the coherent control of such systems on their fundamental timescales.

quantum optics↗
DOE OSTI2025

State preparation of lattice field theories using quantum optimal control

Here, we explore the application of quantum optimal control (QOC) techniques to state preparation of lattice field theories on quantum computers. As a first example, we focus on the Schwinger model, quantum electrodynamics in 1+1 dimensions. We demonstrate that QOC can significantly speed up the ground state preparation compared to gate-based methods, even for models with long-range interactions. Using classical simulations, we explore the dependence on the interqubit coupling strength and the device connectivity, and we study the optimization in the presence of noise. While our simulations indicate potential speedups, the results strongly depend on the device specifications. In addition, we perform exploratory studies on the preparation of thermal states. Our results motivate further studies of QOC techniques in the context of quantum simulations for fundamental physics.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2025

Impact of dynamics, entanglement and Markovian noise on the fidelity of few-qubit digital quantum simulation

Quantum algorithms have been proposed to accelerate the simulation of the chaotic dynamical systems that are ubiquitous in the physics of plasmas. Quantum computers without error correction might even use noise to their advantage to calculate the Lyapunov exponent by measuring the Loschmidt echo fidelity decay rate. For the first time, digital Hamiltonian simulations of the quantum sawtooth map, performed on the IBM-Q quantum hardware platform, show that the fidelity decay rate of a digital quantum simulation increases during the transition from dynamical localization to chaotic diffusion in the map. The observed error per CNOT gate increases by $1.5{\times }$ as the dynamics varies from localized to diffusive, while only changing the phases of virtual RZ gates and keeping the overall gate count constant. A gate-based Lindblad noise model that captures the effective change in relaxation and dephasing errors during gate operation qualitatively explains the effect of dynamics on fidelity as being due to the localization and entanglement of the states created. Specifically, highly delocalized states that are entangled with random phases show an increased sensitivity to dephasing and, on average, a similar sensitivity to relaxation as localized states. In contrast, delocalized unentangled states show an increased sensitivity to dephasing but a lower sensitivity to relaxation. This gate-based Lindblad model is shown to be a useful benchmarking tool by estimating the effective Lindblad coherence times during CNOT gates and finding a consistent $2\unicode{x2013}3{\times }$ shorter $T_2$ time than reported for idle qubits. Thus, the interplay of the dynamics of a simulation with the noise processes that are active can strongly influence the overall fidelity decay rate.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

An efficient quantum circuit for block encoding a pairing Hamiltonian

We present an efficient quantum circuit for block encoding a pairing Hamiltonian often studied in nuclear physics. Our block encoding scheme does not require mapping the creation and annihilation operators to the Pauli operators and representing the Hamiltonian as a linear combination of unitaries. Instead, we show how to encode the Hamiltonian directly using controlled swap operations. We analyze the gate complexity of the block encoding circuit and show that it scales polynomially with respect to the number of qubits required to represent a quantum state associated with the pairing Hamiltonian. We also show how the block encoding circuit can be combined with the quantum singular value transformation to construct an efficient quantum circuit for approximating the density of states of a pairing Hamiltonian. The techniques presented can be extended to encode more general second-quantized Hamiltonians.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗