Quantum LQG Control with Quantum Mechanical Controllers

Abstract

Based on a recently developed notion of physical realizability for quantum linear stochastic systems, we formulate a quantum LQG optimal control problem for quantum linear stochastic systems where the controller itself may also be a quantum system and the plant output signal can be fully quantum. This is distinct from previous works on the quantum LQG problem where measurement is performed on the plant and the measurement signals are used as input to a fully classical controller with no quantum degrees of freedom. The difference in our formulation is the presence of additional non-linear and linear constraints on the coefficients of the sought after controller, rendering the problem as a type of constrained controller problem. Due to the presence of these constraints our problem is inherently computationally hard and this distinguishes it in an important way from the standard LQG problem. We propose a numerical procedure for solving this problem based on an alternating projections algorithm and, as initial demonstration of the feasibility of this approach, we provide a fully quantum controller design example in which a numerical solution to the problem was successfully obtained.