We critically evaluate the most widespread assumption in the theoretical description of coherent control strategies for open quantum systems. We show that, for non-Markovian open systems dynamics, this fixed-dissipator assumption leads to a serious pitfall generally causing difficulties in the effective modeling of the controlled system. We show that at present, to avoid these problems, a full microscopic description of the controlled system in the presence of noise may often be necessary. We illustrate our findings with a paradigmatic example.
We critically evaluate the most widespread assumption in the theoretical description of coherent control strategies for open quantum systems. We show that, for non-Markovian open systems dynamics, this fixed-dissipator assumption leads to a serious pitfall generally causing difficulties in the effective modeling of the controlled system. We show that at present, to avoid these problems, a full microscopic description of the controlled system in the presence of noise may often be necessary. We illustrate our findings with a paradigmatic example.
The basic features of the dynamics of open quantum systems, such as the dissipation of energy, the decay of coherences, the relaxation to an equilibrium or non-equilibrium stationary state, and the transport of excitations in complex structures are of central importance in many applications of quantum mechanics. The theoretical description, analysis and control of non-Markovian quantum processes play an important role in this context. While in a Markovian process an open system irretrievably loses information to its surroundings, non-Markovian processes feature a flow of information from the environment back to the open system, which implies the presence of memory effects and represents the key property of non-Markovian quantum behavior. Here, we review recent ideas developing a general mathematical definition for non-Markoviantiy in the quantum regime and a measure for the degree of memory effects in the dynamics of open systems which are based on the exchange of information between system and environment. We further study the dynamical effects induced by the presence of system-environment correlations in the total initial state and design suitable methods to detect such correlations through local measurements on the open system.
The problem of optimal control of non-Markovian open quantum system via weak measurement is presented. Based on the non-Markovian master equation, we evaluate exactly the non-Markovian effect on the dynamics of the system of interest interacting with a dissipative reservoir. We find that the non-Markovian reservoir has dual effects on the system: dissipation and backaction. The dissipation exhausts the coherence of the quantum system, whereas the backaction revives it. Moreover, we design the control Hamiltonian with the control laws attained by the stochastic optimal control and the corresponding optimal principle. At last, we considered the exact decoherence dynamics of a qubit in a dissipative reservoir composed of harmonic oscillators, and demonstrated the effectiveness of our optimal control strategy. Simulation results showed that the coherence will completely lost in the absence of control neither in non-Markovian nor Markovian system. However, the optimal feedback control steers it to a stationary stochastic process which fluctuates around the target. In this case the decoherence can be controlled effectively, which indicates that the engineered artificial reservoirs with optimal feedback control may be designed to protect the quantum coherence in quantum information and quantum computation.
We study the optimal control problem in a non-Markovian open quantum system. The quantum system of interest is coupled to its local environment, which is dissipative in nature and tends to decay the quantum system. Based on the non-Markovian master equation, we study the non-Markovian effects on the system dynamics. The non-Markovian environment has dual effects on the quantum system: the dissipation and the backaction. The dissipation effect makes the system lose of quantum features, whereas the backaction revives it. We further design quantum control laws to control the system. The optimal control principle is studied to steer to quantum state to a target state. Finally, as an example, we used the optimal control method to control the quantum decoherence.
We present the non-Markovian generalization of the widely used stochastic Schrodinger equation. Our result allows to describe open quantum systems in terms of stochastic state vectors rather than density operators, without approximation. Moreover, it unifies two recent independent attempts towards a stochastic description of non-Markovian open systems, based on path integrals on the one hand and coherent states on the other. The latter approach utilizes the analytical properties of coherent states and enables a microscopic interpretation of the stochastic states. The alternative first approach is based on the general description of open systems using path integrals as originated by Feynman and Vernon.
Open-system descriptions are typically introduced by coupling a quantum system to an external environment. Here we show that a closed interacting many-body system can itself generate a controlled non-Markovian quantum channel acting on a reduced nonlinear qubit through finite-size corrections to a nonlinear mean-field limit. We demonstrate this using the Kitagawa-Ueda one-axis twisting model, H=χJz2, a paradigmatic model of collective spin dynamics, spin squeezing, and two-component Bose-Einstein condensates. Although the large-N regime of this model has been extensively studied, the conventional fixed-χ scaling does not yield a nontrivial dynamical large-N limit. In this paper, we investigate a complementary large-N formulation obtained from the double limit N→∞ and χ→O(g/N), where g is a coupling constant. We derive the leading finite-N corrections to this limit and show that they correspond to an emergent non-Markovian dephasing process, producing a Gaussian decay of the Bloch-vector coherence with characteristic timescale tφ≥N/(2g). Exact finite-N calculations demonstrate that this effective open-system description becomes quantitatively accurate for systems containing on the order of one hundred qubits. The resulting framework provides a microscopic realization of non-Markovian dephasing generated intrinsically by a closed many-body system and enables efficient simulation of collective quantum dynamics beyond unitary mean-field theory. These results link the long-studied phenomenon of phase diffusion in atomic ensembles and Bose-Einstein condensates to the growing effort to characterize non-Markovian, beyond-Lindblad noise in quantum computing hardware, providing a rare case in which such a noise channel is derived from microscopic dynamics rather than fit phenomenologically.