Incoherent Quantum Control

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in incoherent quantum control, which manipulates the non-unitary part of quantum evolution via environment interactions, expanding the capabilities beyond traditional coherent control methods.

Contribution

It provides a summary of recent results on incoherent control using environment interactions, including controllability and landscape analysis, highlighting its potential to overcome limitations of coherent control.

Findings

Incoherent control extends quantum control capabilities.

Controllability of open quantum systems can be achieved through environment manipulation.

Landscape analysis helps understand the optimization of incoherent control strategies.

Abstract

Conventional approaches for controlling open quantum systems use coherent control which affects the system's evolution through the Hamiltonian part of the dynamics. Such control, although being extremely efficient for a large variety of problems, has limited capabilities, e.g., if the initial and desired target states have density matrices with different spectra or if a control field needs to be designed to optimally transfer different initial states to the same target state. Recent research works suggest extending coherent control by including active manipulation of the non-unitary (i.e., incoherent) part of the evolution. This paper summarizes recent results specifically for incoherent control by the environment (e.g., incoherent radiation or a gaseous medium) with a kinematic description of controllability and landscape analysis.