Non-Abelian geometric phases in a system of coupled quantum bits

Abstract

A common strategy to measure the Abelian geometric phase for a qubit is to let it evolve along an 'orange slice' shaped path connecting two antipodal points on the Bloch sphere by two different semi- great circles. Since the dynamical phases vanish for such paths, this allows for direct measurement of the geometric phase. Here, we generalize the orange slice setting to the non-Abelian case. The proposed method to measure the non-Abelian geometric phase can be implemented in a cyclic chain of four qubits with controllable interactions.