Optimal pulse design in quantum control: A unified computational method

Many key aspects of control of quantum systems involve manipulating a large quantum ensemble exhibiting variation in the value of parameters characterizing the system dynamics. Developing electromagnetic pulses to produce a desired evolution in the presence of such variation is a fundamental and challenging problem in this research area. We present such robust pulse designs as an optimal control problem of a continuum of bilinear systems with a common control function. We map this control problem of infinite dimension to a problem of polynomial approximation employing tools from geometric control theory. We then adopt this new notion and develop a unified computational method for optimal pulse design using ideas from pseudospectral approximations, by which a continuous-time optimal control problem of pulse design can be discretized to a constrained optimization problem with spectral accuracy. Furthermore, this is a highly flexible and efficient numerical method that requires low order of discretization and yields inherently smooth solutions. We demonstrate this method by designing effective broadband π/2 and π pulses with reduced rf energy and pulse duration, which show significant sensitivity enhancement at the edge of the spectrum over conventional pulses in 1D and 2D NMR spectroscopy experiments.