Rigorous Performance Bounds for Quadratic and Nested Dynamical Decoupling

Abstract: We present rigorous performance bounds for the quadratic dynamical decoupling (QDD) pulse sequence which protects a qubit from general decoherence, and for its nested generalization to an arbitrary number of qubits. Our bounds apply under the assumption of instantaneous pulses and of bounded perturbing environment and qubit-environment Hamiltonians such as those realized by baths of nuclear spins in quantum dots. We prove that if the total sequence time is fixed then the trace-norm distance between the unperturbed and protected system states can be made arbitrarily small by increasing the number of applied pulses.