High-Order Dynamical Decoupling in the Weak-Coupling Regime

We introduce a high-order dynamical decoupling (DD) scheme for arbitrary bounded system-bath interactions in the weak-coupling regime. Given any decoupling group G that averages the interaction to zero, our construction guarantees the existence of pulse sequences with at most (|G|-1)K pulses, while canceling all error terms linear in the system-bath coupling strength up to order K in the total evolution time. As a corollary, for an n-qubit system with k-local system-bath interactions, we obtain an O(n^{k-1}K)-pulse sequence, a significant improvement over existing schemes with O(exp(n)) pulses [for k=O(1)]. The construction is obtained via a mapping to the continuous necklace-splitting problem, which asks how to cut a multicolored interval into pieces that give each party the same share of every color. We provide explicit pulse sequences for suppressing general single-qubit decoherence, prove that the pulse count is asymptotically optimal, and verify the predicted error scaling in numerical simulations. For the same number of pulses, we observe that our sequences outperform the state-of-the-art quadratic DD in the weak-coupling regime. We also construct explicit high-order sequences for suppressing representative 2-local noise models. Finally, the same construction extends to suppress slow, time-dependent classical noise and to filter-function design.