Dynamic Cooling on Contemporary Quantum Computers

Abstract

We study the problem of dynamic cooling whereby a target qubit is cooled at the expense of heating up $N-1$ further identical qubits, by means of a global unitary operation. A standard back-of-the-envelope high temperature estimate establishes that the target qubit temperature can only be dynamically cooled by at most a factor of $1/\sqrt{N}$. Here, we provide the exact expression for the minimum temperature to which the target qubit can be cooled and reveal that there is a crossover from the high initial temperature regime where the scaling is in fact $1/\sqrt{N}$ to a low initial temperature regime where a much faster scaling of $1/N$ occurs. This slow $1/\sqrt{N}$ scaling, which was relevant for early high-temperature NMR quantum computers, is the reason dynamic cooling was dismissed as ineffectual around 20 years ago; the fact that current low-temperature quantum computers fall in the fast $1/N$ scaling regime, reinstates the appeal of dynamic cooling today. We further show that the associated work cost of cooling is exponentially more advantageous in the low temperature regime. We discuss the implementation of dynamic cooling in terms of quantum circuits and examine the effects of hardware noise. We successfully demonstrate dynamic cooling in a 3-qubit system on a real quantum processor. Since the circuit size grows quickly with $N$, scaling dynamic cooling to larger systems on noisy devices poses a challenge. We therefore propose a suboptimal cooling algorithm, whereby relinquishing a small amount of cooling capability results in a drastically reduced circuit complexity, greatly facilitating the implementation of dynamic cooling on near-future quantum computers.