Risk-sensitive Optimization for Robust Quantum Controls

Abstract: Highly accurate and robust control of quantum operations is vital for the realization of error-correctible quantum computation. In this paper, we show that the robustness of high-precision controls can be remarkably enhanced through sampling-based stochastic optimization of a risk-sensitive loss function. Following the stochastic gradient-descent direction of this loss function, the optimization is guided to penalize poor-performance uncertainty samples in a tunable manner. We propose two algorithms, which are termed as the risk-sensitive GRAPE and the adaptive risk-sensitive GRAPE. Their effectiveness is demonstrated by numerical simulations, which is shown to be able to achieve high control robustness while maintaining high fidelity.