Interconversion of $W$ and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states for Ising-coupled qubits with transverse global control

Abstract

Interconversions of W and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states in various physical systems are lately attracting considerable attention. We address this problem in the fairly general physical setting of qubit arrays with Ising-type qubit-qubit interaction, which are simultaneously acted upon by transverse Zeeman-type global control fields. Motivated in part by a recent Lie-algebraic result that implies state-to-state controllability of such a system for an arbitrary pair of states that are invariant with respect to qubit permutations, we present a detailed investigation of the state-interconversion problem in the three-qubit case. The envisioned interconversion protocol has the form of a pulse sequence that consists of two instantaneous (delta-shaped) control pulses, each of them corresponding to a global qubit rotation, and an Ising-interaction pulse of finite duration between them. Its construction relies heavily on the use of the (four-dimensional) permutation-invariant subspace (symmetric sector) of the three-qubit Hilbert space. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed state-interconversion scheme, we provide a detailed analysis of the robustness of the underlying pulse sequence to errors, i.e. deviations from the optimal values of its five characteristic parameters.