TY - JOUR T1 - Signatures of incoherence in a quantum information processor Y1 - 2007 A1 - Michael K. Henry A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Yaakov S. Weinstein A1 - Paola Cappellaro A1 - Joseph Emerson A1 - Nicolas Boulant A1 - Jonathan S. Hodges A1 - Chandrasekhar Ramanathan A1 - Timothy F. Havel A1 - Rudy Martinez A1 - David G. Cory AB - Incoherent noise is manifest in measurements of expectation values when the underlying ensemble evolves under a classical distribution of unitary processes. While many incoherent processes appear decoherent, there are important differences. The distribution functions underlying incoherent processes are either static or slowly varying with respect to control operations and so the errors introduced by these distributions are refocusable. The observation and control of incoherence in small Hilbert spaces is well known. Here we explore incoherence during an entangling operation, such as is relevant in quantum information processing. As expected, it is more difficult to separate incoherence and decoherence over such processes. However, by studying the fidelity decay under a cyclic entangling map we are able to identify distinctive experimental signatures of incoherence. This result is demonstrated both through numerical simulations and experimentally in a three qubit nuclear magnetic resonance implementation. UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.3666v2 ER -