Preparation of pseudo-pure states for NMR quantum computing with one ancillary qubit

Quantum state preparation plays an equally important role as quantum operations and measurements in quantum information processing. The previous methods for initialization require either an exponential number of experiments, or cause signal reduction or place restrictions on molecular structures. In this study, we propose three types of quantum circuits for preparing the pseudo-pure states of (n - 1) qubits in the n-coupled Hilbert space, which simply needs the assistance of one ancilla spin and two different experiments independent of n. Most importantly, our methods work well on homo-nuclear and hetero-nuclear molecules without the reduction of signals in the gradient field. As a proof-of-principle demonstration, we experimentally prepared the pseudo-pure states of heteronuclear 2-qubit and homonuclear 4-qubit molecules using a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum information processor.