Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 16, 2026

Generation and Coherent Control of Pulsed Quantum Frequency Combs
Published on: June 8, 2018
Complexity and simplicity of optimal control theory pulses shaped for controlling vibrational qubits
Dmytro Shyshlov1, Dmitri Babikov
1Department of Chemistry, Marquette University, PO Box 1881, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201, USA.
Abstract:
In the context of molecular quantum computation the optimal control theory (OCT) is used to obtain shaped laser pulses for high-fidelity control of vibrational qubits. Optimization is done in time domain and the OCT algorithm varies values of electric field in each time step independently, tuning hundreds of thousands of parameters to find one optimal solution. Such flexibility is not available in experiments, where pulse shaping is done in frequency domain and the number of "tuning knobs" is much smaller. The question of possible experimental interpretations of theoretically found OCT solutions arises. In this work we analyze very accurate optimal pulse that we obtained for implementing quantum gate CNOT for the two-qubit system encoded into the exited vibrational states of thiophosgene molecule. Next, we try to alter this pulse by reducing the number of available frequency channels and intentionally introducing systematic and random errors (in frequency domain, by modifying the values of amplitudes and phases of different frequency components). We conclude that a very limited number of frequency components (only 32 in the model of thiophosgene) are really necessary for accurate control of the vibrational two-qubit system, and such pulses can be readily constructed using OCT. If the amplitude and phase errors of different frequency components do not exceed ±3% of the optimal values, one can still achieve accurate transformations of the vibrational two-qubit system, with gate fidelity of CNOT exceeding 0.99.
Related Concept Videos
Open and closed-loop control systems
An open-loop control system operates without feedback from the output. It consists of two primary elements: the controller and the controlled process. The controller receives an input signal and...
Control Systems
At the heart...
Feedback control systems
Linear feedback systems are theoretical models that simplify analysis and design. These systems operate under the principle that their output is directly proportional to their input within certain ranges. For instance, an amplifier in a control system behaves linearly as long as the input signal remains within a specific range. However, most physical systems exhibit inherent nonlinearity...
Conservation of Energy in Control Volume
For steady flow systems, the time derivative of the stored energy becomes zero since there is no energy accumulation within the control volume. This simplifies the energy equation to:
Transfer Function in Control Systems
To derive the transfer function, consider a general nth-order linear time-invariant...
Linear Momentum in Control Volume
