By Michael Kasprzak & Yiyou Chen
Typically, when we want to perform a specific action on a quantum system, like implementing a gate, we go to the computer and ask it to create a control pulse. This works fine in practice, but typically the pulses are very complicated and it is hard to understand the underlying dynamics of what is going on. Mechanism is how we describe this intricate time evolution of the system.
Two approaches to mechanism that we are working on include:
- Breaking the evolution up into quantum pathways each with a complex-valued amplitude. The evolution of the system is then simply the sum of all these various pathways.
- Modeling the flow of probability between states of the system through time similar to a network flow problem. This mechanism information helps us better understand the physics of these systems and can also explain why different control pulses have different characteristics like robustness to noise.