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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Effectiveness of the Krotov method in finding controls for open quantum systems

Marllos E. F. Fernandes, F. F. Fanchini, Emanuel F. de Lima, L. K. Castelano

Published Nov 9, 2023• 14 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract We apply the Krotov method (KM) for open and closed quantum systems to find optimized controls to manipulate qubit/qutrit systems in the presence of the external environment. In the case of unitary optimization, the KM is first applied to a quantum system neglecting its interaction with the environment. The resulting controls from the unitary optimization are then used to drive the system along with the environmental noise. In the case of non-unitary optimization, the KM already takes into account the noise during the optimization process. We consider two distinct computational tasks: target-state preparation and quantum gate implementation. These tasks are carried out in simple qubit/qutrit systems and also in systems presenting leakage states. For the state preparation cases, the controls from the non-unitary optimization outperform the controls from the unitary optimization. However, as we show here, this is not always true for the implementation of quantum gates. There are some situations where the unitary optimization performs equally well compared to the non-unitary optimization. We verify that these situations correspond to either the absence of leakage states or to the effects of dissipation being spread uniformly over the system, including non-computational levels. For such cases, the quantum gate implementation must cover the entire Hilbert space and there is no way to dodge dissipation. On the other hand, if the subspace containing the computational levels and its complement are differently affected by dissipation, the non-unitary optimization becomes effective.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8121/ad0b5b

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arXiv:1203.6128•Physical Review A•Mar 19, 2012•62 citations
Abstract We apply the Krotov method (KM) for open and closed quantum systems to find optimized controls to manipulate qubit/qutrit systems in the presence of the external environment. In the case of unitary optimization, the KM is first applied to a quantum system neglecting its interaction with the environment. The resulting controls from the unitary optimization are then used to drive the system along with the environmental noise. In the case of non-unitary optimization, the KM already takes into account the noise during the optimization process. We consider two distinct computational tasks: target-state preparation and quantum gate implementation. These tasks are carried out in simple qubit/qutrit systems and also in systems presenting leakage states. For the state preparation cases, the controls from the non-unitary optimization outperform the controls from the unitary optimization. However, as we show here, this is not always true for the implementation of quantum gates. There are some situations where the unitary optimization performs equally well compared to the non-unitary optimization. We verify that these situations correspond to either the absence of leakage states or to the effects of dissipation being spread uniformly over the system, including non-computational levels. For such cases, the quantum gate implementation must cover the entire Hilbert space and there is no way to dodge dissipation. On the other hand, if the subspace containing the computational levels and its complement are differently affected by dissipation, the non-unitary optimization becomes effective.
We apply the Krotov method for open and closed quantum systems with the objective of finding optimized controls to manipulate qubit/qutrit systems in the presence of the external environment. In the case of unitary optimization, the Krotov method is first applied to a quantum system neglecting its interaction with the environment. The resulting controls from the unitary optimization are then used to drive the system along with the environmental noise. In the case of non-unitary optimization, the Krotov method already takes into account the noise during the optimization process. We consider two distinct computational task: target-state preparation and quantum gate implementation. These tasks are carried out in simple qubit/qutrit systems and also in systems presenting leakage states. For the state-preparation cases, the controls from the non-unitary optimization outperform the controls from the unitary optimization. However, as we show here, this is not always true for the implementation of quantum gates. There are some situations where the unitary optimization performs equally well compared to the non-unitary optimization. We verify that these situations corresponds to either the absence of leakage states or to the effects of dissipation being spread uniformly over the system, including non-computational levels. For such cases, the quantum gate implementation must cover the entire Hilbert space and there is no way to dodge dissipation. On the other hand, if the subspace containing the computational levels and its complement are differently affected by dissipation, the non-unitary optimization becomes effective.
All physical quantum systems are in contact with the external world which is inevitably a source of noise. It is therefore necessary to take into account this dissipation when designing controls that accomplish useful tasks in quantum information processing. This thesis is on that overlap of open quantum systems and control theory; it looks at what dynamics can happen with the use of external driving, and how this driving can be chosen to accomplish a desired goal. The first result looks at how a given quantum dissipator can be manipulated, using coherent controls, into replicating the action of a different type of noise. This results in no-go theorems for how noise can be transformed based on its isotropy, with applications in simulating open systems. Another way of doing simulations is to use only unitary dynamics over the system and a finite dimensional ancilla, and it is proved that there always exists a dilation Hamiltonian that replicates the noisy dynamics continuously in time. This also highlights the fact that adding controls on noise can result in a different evolution than if the controls were done on the under- lying system-environment level. A conjecture is introduced and studied which states that both approaches are equivalent in the special case of the controls commuting with the Lindbladian. A way around this difficulty is to use a quantum system to compute in situ which controls are best for achieving a desired task on itself. This problem is studied in the context of reaching entangling gates on a quantum simulator in order to upgrade it into a quantum computer. The experimental cost of doing so is found to be polynomial in the number of qubits in simulations. The same underlying principle is also used to find error correcting codes tailored to the dissipation in a system.
Based on the exact non-Markovian master equation for two interacting two-level atoms coupled to a dissipative zero-temperature bonsonic environment, we extend the results of Tai [Phys. Rev. A 89, 062310 (2014)], in which optimal control approach is used to implement one-qubit gates within the same environment, to two-qubit gate implementations with the help of Krotov's iterative method for optimal control. Furthermore, for practical applications, the realization of a quantum circuit comprising cascaded quantum gates is considered.
This work considers two-qubit open quantum systems driven by coherent and incoherent controls. Incoherent control induces time-dependent decoherence rates via time-dependent spectral density of the environment which is used as a resource for controlling the system. The system evolves according to the Gorini–Kossakowski– Sudarshan–Lindblad master equation with time-dependent coefficients. For two types of interaction with coherent control, three types of objectives are considered: 1) maximizing the Hilbert–Schmidt overlap between the final and target density matrices; 2) minimizing the Hilbert–Schmidt distance between these matrices; 3) steering the overlap to a given value. For the first problem, we develop the Krotov type methods directly in terms of density matrices with or without regularization for piecewise continuous controls with constaints and find the cases where the methods produce (either exactly or with some precision) zero controls which satisfy the Pontryagin maximum principle and produce the overlap’s values close to their upper bounds. For the problems 2) and 3), we find cases when the dual annealing method steers the objectives close to zero and produces a non-zero control.
We study the implementation of one-, two- and three-qubit quantum gates for interacting qubits using optimal control. Markovian and non-Markovian environments are compared and efficient optimization algorithms utilizing analytic gradient expressions and quasi-Newton updates are given for both cases. The performance of the algorithms is analysed for a large set of problems in terms of the fidelities attained and the observed convergence behaviour. New notions of success rate and success speed are introduced and density plots are utilized to study the effects of key parameters, such as gate operation times, and random variables such as the initial fields required to start the iterative algorithm. Core characteristics of the optimal fields are analysed statistically. Substantial differences between Markovian and non-Markovian environments in terms of the possibilities for control and the control mechanisms are uncovered. In the non-Markovian case, gate fidelities improve substantially when the details of the system bath coupling are taken into account, although imperfections such as field leakage can be a significant problem. In the Markovian case, computation time is saved if the fields are pre-optimized neglecting the environment, while including the latter generally does not significantly improve gate fidelities.
An efficient optimal-control theory based on the Krotov method is introduced for a non-Markovian open quantum system with a time-nonlocal master equation in which the control parameter and the bath correlation function are correlated. This optimal-control method is developed via a quantum dissipation formulation that transforms the time-nonlocal master equation to a set of coupled linear time-local equations of motion in an extended auxiliary Liouville space. As an illustration, the optimal-control method is applied to find the control sequences for high-fidelity ZZZ gates and identity gates of a qubit embedded in a non-Markovian bath. ZZZ gates and identity gates with errors less than ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}5}$ for a wide range of bath decoherence parameters can be achieved for the non-Markovian open qubit system with control over only the ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{z}$ term. The control-dissipation correlation and the memory effect of the bath are crucial in achieving the high-fidelity gates.