Workshop Proposal: Quantum Control Summer School, August 8-14, 2005; California Institute of Technology; Pasadena, CA

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

We are submitting this proposal to request NSF support for a Quantum Control SummerSchool, to be held 8-14 August 2005 at the California Institute of Technology. Thisschool is being organized in response to burgeoning interest among physicists, engineersand applied mathematicians in exploring the principles and applications of control insystems whose behavior is manifestly quantum mechanical. The lectures will be addressedmainly to graduate students and senior researchers who are just getting started in thefield, but will include some advanced presentations to provide some perspective onresearch frontiers. We have already secured seed funding for the summer school fromCaltech's initiative in Information Science and Technology, but we are seeking additionalsupport from government agencies including the NSF and AFOSR.Intellectual merit: Control theory is a central discipline in modern engineering, but sofar there has been only preliminary research on extending its constitutive methodologiesto incorporate quantum dynamics and measurement. Applications areas for quantum controltheory range from protein structure determination to precision measurement and metrology,and deep connections have been identified with the field of quantum computation. Weanticipate that this summer school can play a critical role in stimulating the developmentof quantum control, as it has the enthusiastic support of important constituencies incontrol theory, mathematical physics, atomic physics, quantum optics and condensed matterphysics.Broader impact: This summer school will provide a unique educational experience for bothstudents and senior researchers who attend. Its topic is inherently interdisciplinary andhas sufficiently strong intellectual appeal to draw the attention of leading researchersin both engineering and pure physics. It seems reasonable to hope that events of thiskind will spur a synthesis of quantum physics, dynamical systems theory and probabilitytheory in the same way that early workshops on quantum computation facilitated thedevelopment of a common language for physicists and computer scientists.