Universal dynamical decoupling: Two-qubit states and beyond

Uhrig's dynamical decoupling pulse sequence has emerged as a universal and highly promising approach to decoherence suppression. So far, both the theoretical and experimental studies have examined single-qubit decoherence only. This work extends Uhrig's universal dynamical decoupling from one-qubit to two-qubit systems and even to general multilevel quantum systems. In particular, we show that by designing appropriate control Hamiltonians for a two-qubit or a multilevel system, Uhrig's pulse sequence can also preserve a generalized quantum coherence measure to the order of 1+O(T^N+1) with only N pulses. Our results lead to a very useful scheme for efficiently locking two-qubit entangled states. Future important applications of Uhrig's pulse sequence in preserving the quantum coherence of multilevel quantum systems can also be anticipated. ©2010 The American Physical Society