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arXiv:quant-ph/0606187 · Physical Review A

Quantum control by von Neumann measurements

Alexander Nikolaevich Pechen, N. Il’in, Feng Shuang, HERSCHEL A. RABITZ

Published Nov 2, 2006• 118 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A general scheme is presented for controlling quantum systems using evolution driven by nonselective von Neumann measurements, with or without an additional tailored electromagnetic field. As an example, a two-level quantum system controlled by nonselective quantum measurements is considered. The control goal is to find optimal system observables such that consecutive nonselective measurement of these observables transforms the system from a given initial state into a state which maximizes the expected value of a target operator (the objective). A complete analytical solution is found including explicit expressions for the optimal measured observables and for the maximal objective value given any target operator, any initial system density matrix, and any number of measurements. As an illustration, upper bounds on measurement-induced population transfer between the ground and the excited states for any number of measurements are found. The anti-Zeno effect is recovered in the limit of an infinite number of measurements. In this limit the system becomes completely controllable. The results establish the degree of control attainable by a finite number of measurements.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.74.052102

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A general scheme is presented for controlling quantum systems using evolution driven by nonselective von Neumann measurements, with or without an additional tailored electromagnetic field. As an example, a two-level quantum system controlled by nonselective quantum measurements is considered. The control goal is to find optimal system observables such that consecutive nonselective measurement of these observables transforms the system from a given initial state into a state which maximizes the expected value of a target operator (the objective). A complete analytical solution is found including explicit expressions for the optimal measured observables and for the maximal objective value given any target operator, any initial system density matrix, and any number of measurements. As an illustration, upper bounds on measurement-induced population transfer between the ground and the excited states for any number of measurements are found. The anti-Zeno effect is recovered in the limit of an infinite number of measurements. In this limit the system becomes completely controllable. The results establish the degree of control attainable by a finite number of measurements.
We investigate the control of a three-level quantum system by laser fields assisted by von Neumann measurements. We consider a system which is not completely controllable by unitary evolution but which becomes controllable if particular measurements are used. The optimal control is defined from a cost functional which takes into account the measurements. The cost corresponds either to the minimization of the duration of the control or to the minimization of the energy of the laser field. Using the Pontryagin maximum principle, we determine the optimal control which steers the system from a given initial state toward a desired target state. This allows one to determine which observable has to be chosen for the measurement and the time at which the measurement has to be performed.
Quantum measurements are considered for optimal control of quantum dynamics with instantaneous and continuous observations utilized to manipulate population transfer. With an optimal set of measurements, the highest yield in a two-level system can be obtained. An analytical solution is given for the problem of population transfer by measurement-assisted coherent control in a three-level system with dynamical symmetry. The anti-Zeno effect is recovered in the controlled processes. Demonstrations show that suitable observations can be powerful tools in the manipulation of quantum dynamics.
This paper considers the optimal control of quantum systems. The controlled quantum systems are described by the probability-density-matrix-based Liouville–von Neumann equation. Using projection operators, the states of the quantum system are decomposed into two sub-spaces, namely the 'main state' space and the 'remaining state' space. Since the control energy is limited, a solution for optimizing the external control force is proposed in which the main state is brought to the desired main state at a certain target time, while the population of the remaining state is simultaneously suppressed in order to diminish its effects on the final population of the main state. The optimization problem is formulated by maximizing a general cost functional of states and control force. An efficient algorithm is developed to solve the optimization problem. Finally, using the hydrogen fluoride (HF) molecular population transfer problem as an illustrative example, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for a quantum system initially in a mixed state or in a pure state is investigated through numerical simulations.
In this article we review two ways of driving a quantum system to a known pure state via a sequence discrete of von Neumann measurements. The first of them assumes that the initial state of the system is unknown, and the evolution is attained only with the help of two non-commuting observables. For this method, the overall success probability is maximized when the eigentstates of the involved observables constitute mutually unbiased bases. The second method assumes the initial state is known and it uses N observables which are consecutively measured to make the state of the system approach the target state. The probability of success of this procedure converges to 1 as the number of observables increases.
Nonselective quantum measurements, i.e., measurements without reading the results, are often considered as a resource for manipulating quantum systems. In this work, we investigate optimal acceleration of the Landau-Zener (LZ) transitions by nonselective quantum measurements. We use the measurements of a population of a diabatic state of the LZ system at certain time instants as control and find the optimal time instants which maximize the LZ transition. We find surprising nonmonotonic behavior of the maximal transition probability with increase of the coupling parameter when the number of measurements is large. This transition probability gives an optimal approximation to the fundamental quantum Zeno effect (which corresponds to continuous measurements) by a fixed number of discrete measurements. The difficulty for the analysis is that the transition probability as a function of time instants has a huge number of local maxima. We resolve this problem both analytically by asymptotic analysis and numerically by the development of efficient algorithms mainly based on the dynamic programming. The proposed numerical methods can be applied, besides this problem, to a wide class of measurement-based optimal control problems.