Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 17
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-30921-4

Regular Article

Optimal control of quantum revival

¹ Department of Physics, Tampere University of Technology, 33101 Tampere, Finland
² Nanoscience Center, Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, 40014 Jyväskylä, Finland
³ Physics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138 Massachusetts, USA
⁴ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138 Massachusetts, USA

^a e-mail: esa.rasanen@tut.fi

Received: 10 October 2012
Received in final form: 5 November 2012
Published online: 21 January 2013

Abstract

Increasing fidelity is the ultimate challenge of quantum information technology. In addition to decoherence and dissipation, fidelity is affected by internal imperfections such as impurities in the system. Here we show that the quality of quantum revival, i.e., periodic recurrence in the time evolution, can be restored almost completely by coupling the distorted system to an external field obtained from quantum optimal control theory. We demonstrate the procedure with wave-packet calculations in both one- and two-dimensional quantum wells, and analyze the required physical characteristics of the control field. Our results generally show that the inherent dynamics of a quantum system can be idealized at an extremely low cost.