Dynamical decoupling of a qubit with always-on control fields

Abstract

We consider dynamical decoupling schemes in which the qubit is continuously manipulated by a control field at all times. Building on the theory of the Uhrig dynamical decoupling (UDD) sequence and its connections to Chebyshev polynomials, we derive a method of always-on control by expressing the UDD control field as a Fourier series. We then truncate this series and numerically optimize the series coefficients for decoupling, constructing the Chebyshev and Fourier expansion sequence. This approach generates a bounded, continuous control field. We simulate the decoupling effectiveness of our sequence versus a continuous version of UDD for a qubit coupled to fully-quantum and semi-classical dephasing baths and find comparable performance. We derive filter functions for continuous-control decoupling sequences, and we assess how robust such sequences are to noise on control fields. The methods we employ provide a variety of tools to analyze continuous-control dynamical decoupling sequences.