Sub-Riemannian lift advantage in quantum control

Jun Zhang

Kosuke Shizume, Takao Nakajima, Ryo Nakayama +1 more

Nielsen et al. have introduced a Riemannian metric on the space of n-qubit unitary operators [M. A. Nielsen, M. R. Dowling, M. Gu and A. C. Doherty, Science 311 (2006), 1133]. The length of the shortest curve connecting the identity I and a desired unitary operator W defined by this metric is essentially equivalent to the quantum gate complexity of W. This metric, and thus, the Riemannian geodesic equation for this metric, has a parameter q called “penalty” that must be large enough. In this paper, we investigate the sub-Riemannian geodesic equation obtained by taking the limit of the Riemannian geodesic equation as q →∞, and show that the Riemannian geodesics for finite q can be explicitly constructed from the sub-Riemannian geodesics. We also present a numerical algorithm for finding the (sub-)Riemannian geodesics connecting I and W, which is based on the Krotov method in optimal control theory. As an example, we give an exact sub-Riemannian geodesic connecting I and the controlled-controlled-Z gate, which is obtained by guessing from the numerical results of the algorithm.

Jeffrey L. Krause

Francesca Albertini, Domenico D’Alessandro, Benjamin Sheller

We study the time optimal control problem for the evolution operator of an n-level quantum system from the identity to any desired final condition. For the considered class of quantum systems the control couples all the energy levels to a given one and is assumed to be bounded in Euclidean norm. From a mathematical perspective, such a problem is a sub-Riemannian K-P problem, whose underlying symmetric space is SU(n)/S(U(n-1) x U(1)). Following the method of symmetry reduction, we consider the action of S(U(n-1) xU(1)) on SU(n) as a conjugation X ---> AXA^{-1}. This allows us to do a symmetry reduction and consider the problem on a quotient space. We give an explicit description of such a quotient space which has the structure of a stratified space. We prove several properties of sub-Riemannian problems with the given structure. We derive the explicit optimal control for the case of three level quantum systems where the desired operation is on the lowest two energy levels (Lambda-systems). We solve this latter problem by reducing it to an integer quadratic optimization problem with linear constraints.

Diego Quiñones, Sergey Dolgov, Dmitry Savostyanov