General tracking control of arbitrary <Emphasis Type="Italic">N</Emphasis>-level quantum systems using piecewise time-independent potentials

Here we propose a tracking quantum control protocol for arbitrary N-level systems. The goal is to make the expected value of an observable \({\mathcal O}\) to follow a predetermined trajectory S(t). For so, we drive the quantum state \(|\varPsi (t) \rangle \) evolution through an external potential V which depends on \(M_V\) tunable parameters (e.g., the amplitude and phase (thus \(M_V = 2\)) of a laser field in the dipolar condition). At instants \(t_n\), these parameters can be rapidly switched to specific values and then kept constant during time intervals \(\Delta t\). The method determines which sets of parameters values can result in \(\langle \varPsi (t) | {\mathcal O} |\varPsi (t) \rangle = S(t)\). It is numerically robust (no intrinsic divergences) and relatively fast since we need to solve only nonlinear algebraic (instead of a system of coupled nonlinear differential) equations to obtain the parameters at the successive \(\Delta t\)’s. For a given S(t), the required minimum \(M_V = M_{\min }\) ‘degrees of freedom’ of V attaining the control is a good figure of merit of the problem difficulty. For instance, the control cannot be unconditionally realizable if \(M_{\min } > 2\) and V is due to a laser field (the usual context in real applications). As it is discussed and exemplified, in these cases a possible procedure is to relax the control in certain problematic (but short) time intervals. Finally, when existing the approach can systematically access distinct possible solutions, thereby allowing a relatively simple way to search for the best implementation conditions. Illustrations for 3-, 4-, and 5-level systems and some comparisons with calculations in the literature are presented.