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Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

Information Theoretical Limits on Quantum Control

Shiro Kawabata

Published Jan 1, 2003• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Fundamental limits on the controllability of quantum mechanical systems are discussed in the light of quantum information theory. It is shown that the amount of entropy-reduction that can be extracted from a quantum system by feedback controller is upper bounded by a sum of the decrease of entropy achievable in open-loop control and the mutual information between the quantum system and the controller. This upper bound sets a fundamental limit on the performance of any quantum controllers whose designs are based on the possibilities to attain low entropy states.

DOI
10.1143/jpsjs.72sc.189

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Fundamental limits on the controllability of quantum mechanical systems are discussed in the light of quantum information theory. It is shown that the amount of entropy-reduction that can be extracted from a quantum system by feedback controller is upper bounded by a sum of the decrease of entropy achievable in open-loop control and the mutual information between the quantum system and the controller. This upper bound sets a fundamental limit on the performance of any quantum controllers whose designs are based on the possibilities to attain low entropy states.
Fundamental limits on the controllability of quantum mechanical systems are discussed in the light of quantum information theory. It is shown that the amount of entropy-reduction that can be extracted from a quantum system by feedback controller is upper bounded by a sum of the decrease of entropy achievable in open-loop control and the mutual information between the quantum system and the controller. This upper bound sets a fundamental limit on the performance of any quantum controllers whose designs are based on the possibilities to attain low entropy states. An application of this approach pertaining to quantum error correction is also discussed.
Fundamental trade-off relations, such as quantum speed limit and quantum thermodynamic uncertainty relation, describe the performance limits of quantum systems by imposing that improvements in speed or precision necessitate a substantial thermodynamic cost. Quantum feedback control, which is a pivotal technique for manipulating quantum dynamics based on measurement outcomes, is widely employed to enhance system performance. Nevertheless, its impact on these fundamental bounds remains an open question. This work elucidates this influence by establishing a theoretical framework for quantum speed limit and quantum thermodynamic uncertainty relation under a paradigmatic Markovian feedback protocol. We derive general inequalities incorporating the effects of feedback control on speed and precision. Through numerical simulations on a simple two-level system and quantum error correction, a key application of quantum feedback control, we validate our derived bounds and demonstrate that feedback control can indeed improve both speed and precision beyond those achievable limits in uncontrolled systems. Next, to elucidate the mechanism behind these improvements and the qualitative difference from uncontrolled dynamics, we analyze the governing thermodynamic costs, which are the fundamental quantities that constrain speed and precision, within a simple model. Our analysis reveals that feedback can improve the time scaling order of these costs. This modification of the dynamical scaling is the origin of the qualitative performance gain, signifying that the feedback-induced improvements of performance are not merely quantitative but represent a fundamental shift. Consequently, our work offers a comprehensive understanding of how feedback control impacts the fundamental limits on the speed and precision of quantum systems, providing crucial insights for designing high-performance quantum technologies.
The limits of quantum feedback control have immediate consequences for quantum information science at large, yet remain largely unexplored. Here, we combine quantum filtering theory and moment-sum-of-squares techniques to construct a hierarchy of convex optimization problems that furnish monotonically improving, computable bounds on the best attainable performance for a broad class of quantum feedback control problems. These bounds may serve as witnesses of fundamental limitations, optimality certificates, or performance targets. We prove convergence of the bounds to the optimal control performance under technical conditions and demonstrate the practical utility of our approach by designing certifiably near-optimal controllers for a qubit in a cavity subjected to photon counting and homodyne detection measurements.
The study of feedback control inspired by Maxwell's demon has yielded fundamental insights into the relationship between thermodynamics and information. However, its fully quantum formulation, where the controller holds quantum side information that cannot be treated as a classical record, remains incomplete. In this paper, we establish fundamental no-go limits for thermodynamic state conversion while allowing quantum side information to be fed back to the system coherently. From two basic operational principles respected by all physically admissible feedback-control schemes, we derive the tightest possible bounds on the single-shot work of formation and extractable work for arbitrary quantum systems conditioned on arbitrary quantum side information. In the asymptotic limit, these bounds yield a generalized second law of thermodynamics with quantum feedback, governed by a conditional free energy. We further show that this generalized second law is consistent with the traditional second law once the acquisition, processing, and reset of side information are accounted for. These results extend information thermodynamics to the fully quantum regime and provide precise thermodynamic meanings for the negativity of single-shot conditional entropies.
This chapter provides fundamental concepts and problems in quantum control theory. It discusses physical mechanisms behind quantum control theory. The chapter introduces modeling and analysis problems and summarizes open-loop and feedback control methods. In principle, Bayesian feedback may outperform the Markovian feedback because more information extracted from the measurement history can be used to determine the control. The fusion of control theory and quantum physics calls for collaborations between physicists and engineers. In contrast to classical control theory, the body of literature on open-loop control is much larger than that of feedback control. In quantum optimal control theory, all algorithms may suffer from the possible existence of false traps, that is, the search may converge to an undesired locally optimal solution that is not globally optimal. Quantum optimal control theory has been proven to be effective for finite-level or simple few-body systems.
Quantum systems may be used to transmit classical information. To do this the sender encodes information by preparing the system in one of an alphabet of possible states, and sends it to the receiver. The receiver then performs a measurement on the system in order to obtain information about which state was sent. Here we describe a general bound on the information which is accessible to the receiver in such a channel when the receivers measurement is noisy. In addition to extracting classical information, measurements also reduce the entropy of a quantum system. This is important, for example, in quantum feedback control. We discuss two corollaries of the information bound that involve this entropy reduction.