AEM & MnRI Colloquium: Prof. Mark Balas, Texas A&M

Infinite Dimensional Direct Adaptive Control and Quantum Information Systems

Prof Mark Balas, Mechanical Engineering, Texas A & M

2:30 PM on 2022-10-21

Bio: Mark Balas is the Leland Jordan Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Texas A&M University. He was formerly the Guthrie Nicholson Professor of Electrical Engineering and former Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Wyoming. He has the following technical degrees: Ph.D. in Mathematics, MS in Electrical Engineering, MA in Mathematics, and BS in Electrical Engineering. He has held various positions in industry, academia, and government. Among his careers, he has been a university professor for over 40 years with RPI, MIT, University of Colorado-Boulder, University of Wyoming, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and has mentored 45 doctoral students. He has over 350 publications in archive journals, refereed conference proceedings, and technical book chapters. He has been visiting faculty with the Institute for Quantum Information and the Control and Dynamics Division at the California Institute of Technology, the US Air Force Research Laboratory-Kirtland AFB, the NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA Ames Research Center, and was the Associate Director of the University of Wyoming Wind Energy Research Center and adjunct faculty with the School of Energy Resources. He is a life fellow of the AIAA, a life fellow of the IEEE, and a fellow of ASME. But if he ever becomes famous, it will be because he is the father of the Denver drum and bass DJ known as Despise, who is his daughter Maggie.

Abstract: Many control systems are inherently infinite dimensional when they are described by partial differential equations. There is renewed interest in controlling these systems, especially in the quantum information field. Since the dynamics of these systems will not be perfectly known, it is especially of interest to control these systems adaptively and autonomously via low-order finite-dimensional controllers. In our work, we have developed a direct model reference adaptive control and disturbance rejection with very low-order adaptive gain laws for infinite-dimensional systems on Hilbert spaces.

Quantum Information Systems are fundamentally infinite-dimensional. And the basic operations that can be performed on quantum systems to manipulate information are unitary quantum gates. Because of the nature of entanglement at the quantum level, these gates suffer from decoherence and cannot operate in a fully unitary way. It is also quite difficult to perform experiments identifying all the parametric data needed to create precise models of a particular quantum system. Instead, direct adaptive control that is suited to infinite dimensional systems could provide a reduction in the decoherence and allow the quantum gates to function in a more idealized unitary way.

This talk will focus on the effect of infinite dimensionality and some of the issues in controlling quantum information systems. The topics here may sound esoteric, but I hope to give you a version of them that will be reasonably accessible and will still remain as exciting and attractive to you as they are to me.