Time-optimal control for hybrid systems based on the nitrogen-vacancy center

Fast and high fidelity quantum control is the key technology of quantum computing. The hybrid system composed of the nitrogen-vacancy center and nearby Carbon-13 nuclear spin is expected to solve this problem. The nitrogen-vacancy center electron spin enables fast operations for its strong coupling to the control field, whereas the nuclear spins preserve the coherence for their weak coupling to the environment. In this paper, we describe a strategy to achieve time-optimal control of the Carbon-13 nuclear spin qubit by alternating controlling the nitrogen-vacancy center electron spin as an actuator. We transform the qubit gate operation into a switched system. By using the maximum principle, we study the minimum time control of the switched system and obtain the time-optimal control of the qubit gate operation. We show that the X gate and Y gate operations are within 10 μs while the fidelity reaches 0.995. © 2017, South China University of Technology, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany.