Introduction

In this chapter we continue the introduction to dynamical decoupling techniques for open quantum systems that was started in Chapter 4. Here we focus on the construction of efficient schemes for dynamical decoupling and we highlight some combinatorial constructions. Efficiency of decoupling schemes is measured in terms of the number of control operations to be applied to the system. This number should be small, ideally a polynomial in the number of qubits in the system.

If we assume that the quantum system is governed by a general Hamiltonian HS, having interactions involving any subset of the qubits, then any scheme that achieves decoupling of HS is necessarily inefficient in the above sense. The efficient schemes we consider here arise in physically realistic situations where there are much more stringent restrictions on the types of interactions. The most important example is the case of pair-interaction Hamiltonians. These Hamiltonians can be expressed as sums of interaction terms that involve at most two qubits.

While there is a large body of work on dynamical decoupling schemes for pair-interaction Hamiltonians [S90, EBW94,WHH68, H76], which historically has been used mainly in the context of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) theory, the past few years have seen a development of new techniques for decoupling that are based on group theory. We therefore call such techniques, or rather the pulse sequences that an experimenter can apply to a given Hamiltonian in order to selectively switch off unwanted couplings, combinatorial decoupling schemes.