Efficiency of quantum controlled non-Markovian thermalization

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-Markovian effects influence optimal control strategies for quantum thermalization, revealing conditions where memory effects can enhance control effectiveness, with implications for quantum cooling and thermodynamics.

Contribution

It provides a necessary condition for non-Markovianity to improve quantum control efficiency, specifically applied to single qubit amplitude damping channels.

Findings

Non-Markovian effects can enhance control effectiveness under certain conditions.

Derived a necessary condition for non-Markovianity to improve optimal control.

Application to quantum cooling processes and thermodynamic efficiency.

Abstract

We study optimal control strategies to optimize the relaxation rate towards the fixed point of a quantum system in the presence of a non-Markovian dissipative bath. Contrary to naive expectations that suggest that memory effects might be exploited to improve optimal control effectiveness, non-Markovian effects influence the optimal strategy in a non trivial way: we present a necessary condition to be satisfied so that the effectiveness of optimal control is enhanced by non-Markovianity subject to suitable unitary controls. For illustration, we specialize our findings for the case of the dynamics of single qubit amplitude damping channels. The optimal control strategy presented here can be used to implement optimal cooling processes in quantum technologies and may have implications in quantum thermodynamics when assessing the efficiency of thermal micro-machines.