Unavoidable decoherence in the quantum control of an unknown state

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Author(s)
Kielpinski, David
Briggs, Rachael
Wiseman, Howard
Year published
2013
Metadata
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A common objective for quantum control is to force a quantum system, initially in an unknown state, into a particular target subspace. We show that if the subspace is required to be a decoherence-free subspace of dimension greater than 1, then such control must be decoherent. That is, it will take almost any pure state to a mixed state. We make no assumptions about the control mechanism, but our result implies that for this purpose coherent control offers no advantage, in principle, over the obvious measurement-based feedback protocol.A common objective for quantum control is to force a quantum system, initially in an unknown state, into a particular target subspace. We show that if the subspace is required to be a decoherence-free subspace of dimension greater than 1, then such control must be decoherent. That is, it will take almost any pure state to a mixed state. We make no assumptions about the control mechanism, but our result implies that for this purpose coherent control offers no advantage, in principle, over the obvious measurement-based feedback protocol.
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Journal Title
Quantum Measurements and Quantum Metrology
Volume
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2013. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Subject
Quantum Information, Computation and Communication