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arXiv:1304.1357 · Physical Review A

Trap-free manipulation in the Landau-Zener system

Alexander Nikolaevich Pechen, Nikolay Borisovich Ilin

Published Nov 21, 2012• 42 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The analysis of traps, that is, locally but not globally optimal controls, for quantum control systems has attracted great interest in recent years. The central problem that has remained open is to demonstrate for a given system either the existence or the absence of traps. We prove the absence of traps and hence completely solve this problem for the important tasks of unconstrained manipulation of the transition probability and unitary gate generation in the Landau-Zener system, a system with a wide range of applications across physics, chemistry, and biochemistry. This finding provides an example of a controlled quantum system which is completely free of traps. We also discuss the impact of laboratory constraints due to decoherence, noise in the control pulse, and restrictions on the available controls, which, when being sufficiently severe, can produce traps.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.86.052117

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The analysis of traps, that is, locally but not globally optimal controls, for quantum control systems has attracted great interest in recent years. The central problem that has remained open is to demonstrate for a given system either the existence or the absence of traps. We prove the absence of traps and hence completely solve this problem for the important tasks of unconstrained manipulation of the transition probability and unitary gate generation in the Landau-Zener system, a system with a wide range of applications across physics, chemistry, and biochemistry. This finding provides an example of a controlled quantum system which is completely free of traps. We also discuss the impact of laboratory constraints due to decoherence, noise in the control pulse, and restrictions on the available controls, which, when being sufficiently severe, can produce traps.
There is a strong interest in optimal manipulating of quantum systems by external controls. Traps are controls which are optimal only locally but not globally. If they exist, they can be serious obstacles to the search of globally optimal controls in numerical and laboratory experiments, and for this reason the analysis of traps attracts considerable attention. In this paper we prove that for a wide range of control problems for two-level quantum systems all locally optimal controls are also globally optimal. Hence we conclude that two-level systems in general are trap-free. In particular, manipulating qubits—two-level quantum systems forming a basic building block for quantum computation—is free of traps for fundamental problems such as the state preparation and gate generation.
Abstract In this work we study extrema of objective functionals for ultrafast manipulation by a qubit. Traps are extrema of the objective functionals which are optimal for manipulation by quantum systems only locally, not globally. Prior work has devoted a large amount of effort to the analysis of traps for quantum systems controlled by laser pulses which are long enough, and, for example, manipulation by a qubit with long control pulses was shown to be trap-free. Ultrafast femtosecond and attosecond control has now become widely applicable, which makes the analysis of traps on the ultrafast time scale a necessity. We complete such analysis for a qubit and show that ultrafast state transfer in a qubit remains trap-free for a wide range of the initial and final states of the qubit. We prove that for this range the probability of transition between the initial and the final states has a saddle but no traps.
The problems of optimizing the value of an arbitrary observable of a two-level system at both a fixed time and the shortest possible time is theoretically explored. Complete identification and classification along with comprehensive analysis of globally optimal control policies and traps (i.e., policies which are locally but not globally optimal) are presented. The central question addressed is whether the control landscape remains trap-free if control constraints of the inequality type are imposed. The answer is astonishingly controversial: Although the traps are proven always to exist in this case, in practice they become trivially escapable once the control time is fixed and chosen long enough.
The success of quantum optimal control for both experimental and theoretical objectives is connected to the topology of the corresponding control landscapes, which are free from local traps if three conditions are met: (1) the quantum system is controllable, (2) the Jacobian of the map from the control field to the evolution operator is of full rank, and (3) there are no constraints on the control field. This paper investigates how the violation of assumption (3) affects gradient searches for globally optimal control fields. The satisfaction of assumptions (1) and (2) ensures that the control landscape lacks fundamental traps, but certain control constraints can still introduce artificial traps. Proper management of these constraints is an issue of great practical importance for numerical simulations as well as optimization in the laboratory. Using optimal control simulations, we show that constraints on quantities such as the number of control variables, the control duration, and the field strength are potentially severe enough to prevent successful optimization of the objective. For each such constraint, we show that exceeding quantifiable limits can prevent gradient searches from reaching a globally optimal solution. These results demonstrate that careful choice of relevant control parameters helps to eliminate artificial traps and facilitates successful optimization.
A traditional quantum optimal control experiment begins with a specific physical system and seeks an optimal time-dependent field to steer the evolution towards a target observable value. In a more general framework, the Hamiltonian structure may also be manipulated when the material or molecular 'stockroom' is accessible as a part of the controls. The current work takes a step in this direction by considering the converse of the normal perspective to now start with a specific fixed field and employ the system's time-independent Hamiltonian structure as the control to identify an optimal form. The Hamiltonian structure control variables are taken as the system energies and transition dipole matrix elements. An analysis is presented of the Hamiltonian structure control landscape, defined by the observable as a function of the Hamiltonian structure. A proof of system controllability is provided, showing the existence of a Hamiltonian structure that yields an arbitrary unitary transformation when working with virtually any field. The landscape analysis shows that there are no suboptimal traps (i.e., local extrema) for controllable quantum systems when unconstrained structural controls are utilized to optimize a state-to-state transition probability. This analysis is corroborated by numerical simulations on model multilevel systems. The search effort to reach the top of the Hamiltonian structure landscape is found to be nearly invariant to system dimension. A control mechanism analysis is performed, showing a wide variety of behavior for different systems at the top of the Hamiltonian structure landscape. It is also shown that reducing the number of available Hamiltonian structure controls, thus constraining the system, does not always prevent reaching the landscape top. The results from this work lay a foundation for considering the laboratory implementation of optimal Hamiltonian structure manipulation for seeking the best control performance, especially with limited electromagnetic resources.
Abstract Mathematical analysis of quantum control landscapes, which aims to prove either absence or existence of traps for quantum control objective functionals, is an important topic in quantum control. In this work, we provide a rigorous analysis of quantum control landscapes for ultrafast generation of single-qubit quantum gates and show, combining analytical methods based on a sophisticated analysis of spectrum of the Hessian, and numerical optimization methods such as gradient ascent pulse engineering, differential evolution, and dual annealing, that control landscape for ultrafast generation of phase shift gates is free of traps.