Experimental demonstration of an entanglement swapping operation and improved control in NMR quantum-information processing

We demonstrate the implementation of an entanglement swapping operation on a four-qubit liquid-state nuclear-magnetic-resonance (NMR) quantum-information processor. We use this experiment as a benchmark to illustrate the progress made in the field of quantum control using strongly modulating pulses and a correction scheme for removing distortions introduced by the nonlinearities in the transmitter and probe circuits. The advances include compensating for incoherent errors caused by the spatial variation of the system Hamiltonian in the NMR sample. The goal of these control sequences is to cause the collapse of the Kraus operator-sum representation of the superoperator into one unitary operator so that the ensemble appears to evolve as one coherent whole.