Accurate, nontrivial quantum operations on many qubits are experimentally challenging. As opposed to the standard approach of compiling larger unitaries into sequences of 2-qubit gates, we propose a protocol on Hamiltonian control fields which implements highly selective multi-qubit gates in a strongly-coupled many-body quantum system. We exploit the selectiveness of resonant driving to exchange only 2 out of @math eigenstates of some background Hamiltonian, and discuss a basis transformation, the eigengate, that makes this operation relevant to the computational basis. The latter has a second use as a Hahn echo which undoes the dynamical phases due to the background Hamiltonian. We find that the error of such protocols scales favourably with the gate time as @math , but the protocol becomes inefficient with a growing number of qubits N. The framework is numerically tested in the context of a spin chain model first described by Polychronakos, for which we show that an earlier solution method naturally gives rise to an eigengate. Our techniques could be of independent interest for the theory of driven many-body systems.
textabstractWe propose a strategy for engineering multiqubit quantum gates. As a first step, it employs an eigengate to map states in the computational basis to eigenstates of a suitable many-body Hamiltonian. The second step employs resonant driving to enforce a transition between a single pair of eigenstates, leaving all others unchanged. The procedure is completed by mapping back to the computational basis. We demonstrate the strategy for the case of a linear array with an even number N of qubits, with specific XX+YY couplings between nearest neighbors. For this so-called Krawtchouk chain, a two-body driving term leads to the iSWAP_N gate, which we numerically test for N = 4 and 6.