Fast Quantum Gate Control with Trajectory Optimization

Fast quantum control helps reduce the influence of unavoided disturbances and hence plays a vital role in practical quantum technology and chemical reactions. Instead of optimizing the terminal cost like standard optimal quantum control methods, this paper formulates the problem as a trajectory optimization problem, and implements the sequential quadratic programming algorithm to search for short control fields. The core idea is to minimize the cumulative intermediate error to incentivize early achievement of the designed gate. The numerical result on the Toffoli gate demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.