Algorithmic Cooling in Liquid State NMR

Abstract

Algorithmic cooling is a method that employs thermalization to increase qubit purification level, namely it reduces the qubit-system's entropy. We utilized gradient ascent pulse engineering (GRAPE), an optimal control algorithm, to implement algorithmic cooling in liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance. Various cooling algorithms were applied onto the three qubits of $^{13}$C$_2$-trichloroethylene, cooling the system beyond Shannon's entropy bound in several different ways. In particular, in one experiment a carbon qubit was cooled by a factor of 4.61. This work is a step towards potentially integrating tools of NMR quantum computing into in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy.