-The Industrial Electronics Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne has built a prototype of a revolutionary two-wheeled vehicle. Due to its configuration with two coaxial wheels, each of which is coupled to a DC Motor, the vehicle is able to do stationary U-turns. A control system, made up of two decoupled state space controllers, pilots the motors so as to keep the system in equilibrium.See http://leiwww.epfl.ch/joe for a video demonstration of JOE.

We study decoherence due to low frequency noise in Josephson qubits. Non-Markovian classical noise due to switching impurities determines inhomogeneous broadening of the signal. The theory is extended to include effects of high-frequency quantum noise, due to impurities or to the electromagnetic environment. The interplay of slow noise with intrinsically non-Gaussian noise sources may explain the rich physics observed in the spectroscopy and in the dynamics of charge based devices.

In many applications entanglement must be distributed through noisy communication channels that unavoidably degrade it. Entanglement cannot be generated by local operations and classical communication (LOCC), implying that once it has been distributed it is not possible to recreate it by LOCC. Recovery of entanglement by purely local control is however not forbidden in the presence of non-Markovian dynamics, and here we demonstrate in two all-optical experiments that such entanglement restoration can even be achieved on-demand. First, we implement an open-loop control scheme based on a purely local operation, without acquiring any information on the environment; then, we use a closed-loop scheme in which the environment is measured, the outcome controling the local operations on the system. The restored entanglement is a manifestation of “hidden” quantum correlations resumed by the local control. Relying on local control, both schemes improve the efficiency of entanglement sharing in distributed quantum networks.

a b s t r a c tWe investigate the phenomenon of bipartite entanglement revivals under purely local operations in systems subject to local and independent classical noise sources. We explain this apparent paradox in the physical ensemble description of the system state by introducing the concept of ''hidden'' entanglement, which indicates the amount of entanglement that cannot be exploited due to the lack of classical information on the system. For this reason this part of entanglement can be recovered without the action of non-local operations or back-transfer process. For two noninteracting qubits under a low-frequency stochastic noise, we show that entanglement can be recovered by local pulses only. We also discuss how hidden entanglement may provide new insights about entanglement revivals in non-Markovian dynamics.

We study dynamical decoupling of a qubit from non gaussian quantum noise due to discrete sources, as bistable fluctuators and 1/f noise. We obtain analytic and numerical results for generic operating point. For very large pulse frequency, where dynamic decoupling compensates decoherence, we found universal behavior. At intermediate frequencies noise can be compensated or enhanced, depending on the nature of the fluctuators and on the operating point. Our technique can be applied to a larger class of non-gaussian environments.

We show that the amount of coherent quantum information that can be reliably transmitted down a dephasing channel with memory is maximized by separable input states. In particular, we model the channel as a Markov chain or a multimode environment of oscillators. While in the first model the maximization is achieved for the maximally mixed input state, in the latter it is convenient to exploit the presence of a decoherence-protected subspace generated by memory effects. We explicitly compute the quantum channel capacity for the first model while numerical simulations suggest a lower bound for the latter. In both cases memory effects enhance the coherent information. We present results valid for arbitrary size of the input.

In this paper, we study how to preserve entanglement and nonlocality under dephasing produced by classical noise with large low-frequency components, such as 1/f noise, using dynamical decoupling techniques. We first show that quantifiers of entanglement and nonlocality satisfy a closed relation valid for two independent qubits locally coupled to a generic environment under pure dephasing and starting from a general class of initial states. This result allows us to assess the efficiency of pulse-based dynamical decoupling for protecting nonlocal quantum correlations between two qubits subject to pure-dephasing local random telegraph and 1/f noise. We investigate the efficiency of an "entanglement memory" element under two-pulse echo and under sequences of periodic, Carr-Purcell, and Uhrig dynamical decoupling. The Carr-Purcell sequence is shown to outperform the other sequences in preserving entanglement against both random telegraph and 1/f noise. For typical 1/f flux-noise figures in superconducting nanocircuits, we show that entanglement and its nonlocal features can be efficiently stored up to times one order of magnitude longer than natural entanglement disappearance times employing pulse timings of current experimental reach.

We study the entanglement dynamics for two independent superconducting qubits each affected by a bistable impurity generating random telegraph noise (RTN) at pure dephasing. The relevant parameter is the ratio g between qubit-RTN coupling strength and RTN switching rate, that captures the physics of the crossover between Markovian and non-Markovian features of the dynamics. For identical qubit-RTN subsystems, a threshold value g th of the crossover parameter separates exponential decay and onset of revivals; different qualitative behaviors also show up by changing the initial conditions of the RTN. We moreover show that, for different qubit-RTN subsystems, when both qubits are very strongly coupled to the RTN an increase in entanglement revival amplitude may occur during the dynamics.