Laboratory transferability of optimally shaped laser pulses for quantum control

Abstract

Optimal control experiments can readily identify effective shaped laser pulses, or "photonic reagents," that achieve a wide variety of objectives. An important additional practical desire is for photonic reagent prescriptions to produce good, if not optimal, objective yields when transferred to a different system or laboratory. Building on general experience in chemistry, the hope is that transferred photonic reagent prescriptions may remain functional even though all features of a shaped pulse profile at the sample typically cannot be reproduced exactly. As a specific example, we assess the potential for transferring optimal photonic reagents for the objective of optimizing a ratio of photoproduct ions from a family of halomethanes through three related experiments. First, applying the same set of photonic reagents with systematically varying second- and third-order chirp on both laser systems generated similar shapes of the associated control landscape (i.e., relation between the objective yield and the variables describing the photonic reagents). Second, optimal photonic reagents obtained from the first laser system were found to still produce near optimal yields on the second laser system. Third, transferring a collection of photonic reagents optimized on the first laser system to the second laser system reproduced systematic trends in photoproduct yields upon interaction with the homologous chemical family. These three transfers of photonic reagents are demonstrated to be successful upon paying reasonable attention to overall laser system characteristics. The ability to transfer photonic reagents from one laser system to another is analogous to well-established utilitarian operating procedures with traditional chemical reagents. The practical implications of the present results for experimental quantum control are discussed.

Learning-Based Quantum Robust Control: Algorithm, Applications, and Experiments

“…Then we apply the same algorithm to search for a good control for the fragment ratio of CH 2 Br + /CH 2 I + . The consideration of robustness with multiple samples (MS) in DE would also ensure good transferability of the experimental results or photonic reagents [37]. That is, an optimal pulse identified from one laser system would also perform well (if not optimal) when transferred to another system despite the minor differences or uncertainties lying in the control parameters (i.e., the spectral phases on the SLM).…”

“…end if 26: for i = 1 to D do 27: if v j i,G > x j max or v j i,G < x j min then 28: v j i,G = x j min + rand(0, 1) · (x j max − x j min ) 29: end if 30: end for 31: Set parameter CR i,G = Normrnd(0.5, 0.1) 32: while CR i,G < 0 or CR i,G > 1 do 33: CR i,G = Normrnd(0.5, 0.1) 34: end while 35: if flag=1 or flag=2 or flag=3 then 36: for j = 1 to D do 37:…”