Adiabatic elimination for composite open quantum systems: reduced model formulation and numerical simulations

A numerical method is proposed for simulation of composite open quantum systems. It is based on Lindblad master equations and adiabatic elimination. Each subsystem is assumed to converge exponentially towards a stationary subspace, slightly impacted by some decoherence channels and weakly coupled to the other subsystems. This numerical method is based on a perturbation analysis with an asymptotic expansion. It exploits the formulation of the slow dynamics with reduced dimension. It relies on the invariant operators of the local and nominal dissipative dynamics attached to each subsystem. Second-order expansion can be computed only with local numerical calculations. It avoids computations on the tensor-product Hilbert space attached to the full system. This numerical method is particularly well suited for autonomous quantum error correction schemes. Simulations of such reduced models agree with complete full model simulations for typical gates acting on one and two cat-qubits (Z, ZZ and CNOT) when the mean photon number of each cat-qubit is less than 8. For larger mean photon numbers and gates with three cat-qubits (ZZZ and CCNOT), full model simulations are almost impossible whereas reduced model simulations remain accessible. In particular, they capture both the dominant phase-flip error-rate and the very small bit-flip error-rate with its exponential suppression versus the mean photon number.