Trap-free manipulation in the Landau-Zener system

Abstract: The analysis of traps, i.e., locally but not globally optimal controls, for quantum control systems has attracted a great interest in recent years. The central problem that has been remained open is to demonstrate for a given system either existence or absence of traps. We prove the absence of traps and hence completely solve this problem for the important tasks of unconstrained manipulation of the transition probability and unitary gate generation in the Landau-Zener system---a system with a wide range of applications across physics, chemistry and biochemistry. This finding provides the first example of a controlled quantum system which is completely free of traps. We also discuss the impact of laboratory constraints due to decoherence, noise in the control pulse, and restrictions on the available controls which when being sufficiently severe can produce traps.