Entanglement improves classical control

Abstract

Electronic devices all around us contain classical control circuits. Such circuits consist of a network of controllers which can read and write signals to wires of the circuit with the goal to minimize the cost function of the circuit's output signal. Here, we propose the use of shared entanglement between controllers as a resource to improve the performance of otherwise purely classical control circuits. We study a well-known example from the classical control literature and demonstrate that allowing two controllers to share entanglement improves their ability to control. More precisely, we exhibit a family of circuits in which the the cost function using entanglement stays constant, but the minimal cost function without entanglement grows arbitrarily large. This demonstrates that entanglement can be a powerful resource in a classical control circuit.