The regime of good control

Abstract

We derive the equations of motion describing the feedback control of quantum systems in the regime of ``good control", in which the control is sufficient to keep the system close to the desired state. One can view this regime as the quantum equivalent of the ``linearized" regime for feedback control of classical nonlinear systems. Strikingly, while the dynamics of a single qubit in this regime is indeed linear, that of all larger systems remains nonlinear, in contrast to the classical case. As a first application of these equations, we determine the steady-state performance of feedback protocols for a single qubit that use unbiased measurements.