The effect of control field and measurement imprecision on laboratory feedback control of quantum systems

Recent theoretical studies suggest the feasibility of laboratory adaptive feedback optimal control (AFOC) of chemical processes with the use of ultrashort laser pulses. The feedback process is introduced to provide robustness to laboratory error and electric field design uncertainties. Adaptive approaches for laboratory applications have been suggested. To foster laboratory implementation a number of questions still need to be answered. The paper addresses the problem of AFOC in the presence of laboratory errors and uncertainties both in adjusting the control parameters and in measuring the results. Through simulations we show that there exist optimization methods which are robust against systematic errors and certain optimization methods are also fairly robust against uncertainties. These results suggest that the effect of inevitable laboratory errors can be overcome. Furthermore the results suggest that noise is not a major problem and optimization in the laboratory is feasible.