The Impact of Imperfect Timekeeping on Quantum Control

Understand

In order to unitarily evolve a quantum system, an agent requires knowledge of time, a parameter which no physical clock can ever perfectly characterise.

• In this letter, we study how limitations on acquiring knowledge of time impact controlled quantum operations in different paradigms.
• We show that the quality of timekeeping an agent has access to limits the circuit complexity they are able to achieve within circuit-based quantum computation.
• We do this by deriving an upper bound on the average gate fidelity achievable under imperfect timekeeping for a general class of random circuits.