Optimal control for maximally creating and maintaining a superposition state of a two-level system under the influence of Markovian decoherence

Abstract: Reducing decoherence is an essential step toward realizing general-purpose quantum computers beyond the present noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. To this end, dynamical decoupling (DD) approaches in which external fields are applied to qubits are often adopted. We numerically study DD using a two-level model system (qubit) under the influence of Markovian decoherence by using quantum optimal control theory with slightly modified settings, in which the physical objective is to maximally create and maintain a specified superposition state in a specified control period. An optimal pulse is numerically designed while systematically varying the values of dephasing, population decay, pulse fluence, and control period as well as using two kinds of objective functionals. Although the decrease in purity due to the decoherence gives rise to the upper limit of the target expectation value, i.e., the saturated value, the optimally shaped pulse effectively deals with the decoherence by gradually creating the target superposition state to realize the saturated value as much as possible.