No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we discuss the compatibility between the rotating-wave and the adiabatic approximations for controlled quantum systems. Although the paper focuses on applications to two-level quantum systems, the main results apply in higher dimension. Under some suitable hypotheses on the time scales, the two approximations can be combined. As a natural consequence of this, it is possible to design control laws achieving transitions of states between two energy levels of the Hamiltonian that are robust with respect to inhomogeneities of the amplitude of the control input.
In this paper we study up to which extent we can apply adiabatic control strategies to a quantum control model obtained by rotating wave approximation. In particular, we show that, under suitable assumptions on the asymptotic regime between the parameters characterizing the rotating wave and the adiabatic approximations, the induced flow converges to the one obtained by considering the two approximations separately and by combining them formally in cascade. As a consequence, we propose explicit control laws which can be used to induce desired populations transfers, robustly with respect to parameter dispersions in the controlled Hamiltonian.
We provide an in-depth and thorough treatment of the validity of the rotating-wave approximation (RWA) in an open quantum system. We find that when it is introduced after tracing out the environment, all timescales of the open system are correctly reproduced, but the details of the quantum state may not be. The RWA made before the trace is more problematic: it results in incorrect values for environmentally-induced shifts to system frequencies, and the resulting theory has no Markovian limit. We point out that great care must be taken when coupling two open systems together under the RWA. Though the RWA can yield a master equation of Lindblad form similar to what one might get in the Markovian limit with white noise, the master equation for the two coupled systems is not a simple combination of the master equation for each system, as is possible in the Markovian limit. Such a naive combination yields inaccurate dynamics. To obtain the correct master equation for the composite system a proper consideration of the non-Markovian dynamics is required.
In this work, we establish the connection between the study of free spectrahedra and the compatibility of quantum measurements with an arbitrary number of outcomes. This generalizes previous results by the authors for measurements with two outcomes. Free spectrahedra arise from matricial relaxations of linear matrix inequalities. A particular free spectrahedron which we define in this work is the matrix jewel. We find that the compatibility of arbitrary measurements corresponds to the inclusion of the matrix jewel into a free spectrahedron defined by the effect operators of the measurements under study. We subsequently use this connection to bound the set of (asymmetric) inclusion constants for the matrix jewel using results from quantum information theory and symmetrization. The latter translate to new lower bounds on the compatibility of quantum measurements. Among the techniques we employ are approximate quantum cloning and mutually unbiased bases.
A new class of cost functionals for optimal control of quantum systems which produces controls which are sparse in frequency and smooth in time is proposed. This is achieved by penalizing a suitable time-frequency representation of the control field, rather than the control field itself, and by employing norms which are of $L^1$ or measure form with respect to frequency but smooth with respect to time. We prove existence of optimal controls for the resulting nonsmooth optimization problem, derive necessary optimality conditions, and rigorously establish the frequency-sparsity of the optimizers. More precisely, we show that the time-frequency representation of the control field, which a priori admits a continuum of frequencies, is supported on only textit{ finitely many} frequencies. These results cover important systems of physical interest, including (infinite-dimensional) Schrodinger dynamics on multiple potential energy surfaces as arising in laser control of chemical reactions. Numerical simulations confirm that the optimal controls, unlike those obtained with the usual $L^2$ costs, concentrate on just a few frequencies, even in the infinite-dimensional case of laser-controlled chemical reactions.
We describe a general methodology for enhancing the efficiency of adiabatic quantum computations (AQC). It consists of homotopically deforming the original Hamiltonian surface in a way that the redistribution of the Gaussian curvature weakens the effect of the anti-crossing, thus yielding the desired improvement. Our approach is not pertubative but instead is built on our previous global description of AQC in the language of Morse theory. Through the homotopy deformation we witness the birth and death of critical points whilst, in parallel, the Gauss-Bonnet theorem reshuffles the curvature around the changing set of critical points. Therefore, by creating enough critical points around the anti-crossing, the total curvature--which was initially centered at the original anti-crossing--gets redistributed around the new neighbouring critical points, which weakens its severity and so improves the speedup of the AQC. We illustrate this on two examples taken from the literature.