Notions of controllability for quantum mechanical systems

Abstract

In this paper, we define three different notions of controllability for quantum mechanical systems involving the possibility of driving the evolution operator as well as the state of the system. By using general results on transitivity of transformation groups on spheres we establish the connections among these different notions of controllability. Motivated by the physical model of multilevel quantum systems, we also study the relation between the controllability in arbitrary small time of a system varying on a compact transformation Lie group and the corresponding system on the associated homogeneous space. As an application, we prove for the system of two interacting spin 1/2 particles the negative result that not every state transfer can be obtained in arbitrary time.