Periodic excitations of bilinear quantum systems

Abstract

A well-known method of transferring the population of a quantum system from an eigenspace of the free Hamiltonian to another is to use a periodic control law with an angular frequency equal to the difference of the eigenvalues. For finite dimensional quantum systems, the classical theory of averaging provides a rigorous explanation of this experimentally validated result. This paper extends this finite dimensional result, known as the Rotating Wave Approximation, to infinite dimensional systems and provides explicit convergence estimates.