Quadratic behaviors of the 1D linear Schrödinger equation with bilinear control

Abstract

We consider a 1D linear Schrödinger equation, on a bounded interval, with Dirichlet boundary conditions and bilinear control. We study its controllability around the ground state when the linearized system is not controllable and wonder whether the quadratic term can help to recover the directions lost at the first order. More precisely, in this paper, we formulate assumptions under which the quadratic term induces a drift which prevents the small-time local controllability (STLC) of the system in appropriate spaces.For finite-dimensional systems, quadratic terms induce coercive drifts in the dynamic, quantified by integer negative Sobolev norms, along explicit Lie brackets which prevent STLC.In the context of the bilinear Schrödinger equation, the first drift, quantified by the H−1-norm of the control, was already observed in [8] and used to deny STLC with controls small in L∞. In this article, we improve this result by denying STLC with controls small in W−1,∞.Furthermore, for any positive integer n, we formulate assumptions under which one may observe a quadratic drift quantified by the H−n-norm of the control and we use it to deny STLC in suitable spaces.