Prof. Lorenza Viola, Dartmouth College
"Perspectives on Control of Open Quantum Systems and Noisy Qubit"
The John A. Wheeler Lecture Hall (RLM 4.102). Coffee and cookies will be served at 3:45pm in RLM 4.102
Abstract: Developing theoretical and experimental methodologies to accurately control the dynamics of quantum systems is a major challenge across contemporary physics, engineering, and quantum information sciences. While quantum control theory is by now relatively well established for closed quantum systems undergoing unitary dynamics, realistic scenarios unavoidably entail control of open quantum systems, whose dynamics is non-unitary due to the interaction with an external environment. In this Colloquium, I will provide a broad introduction to the field of quantum control and its significance for experimental implementations of quantum information processing, and then focus on the basic principles underlying the simplest setting of open-system control via "open-loop" time-dependent Hamiltonian engineering. In particular, I will describe how the presence of temporal correlations in realistic noise environments may be leveraged to design quantum control schemes that allow for the unwanted noise effects to be characterized and suppressed to high accuracy.