Hessian-based optimization of constrained quantum control

Abstract: Efficient optimization of quantum systems is a necessity for reaching fault tolerant thresholds. A standard tool for optimizing simulated quantum dynamics is the gradient-based \textsc{grape} algorithm, which has been successfully applied in a wide range of different branches of quantum physics. In this work, we derive and implement exact $2^{\mathrm{nd}}$ order analytical derivatives of the coherent dynamics and find improvements compared to the standard of optimizing with the approximate $2^{\mathrm{nd}}$ order \textsc{bfgs}. We demonstrate performance improvements for both the best and average errors of constrained unitary gate synthesis on a circuit-\textsc{qed} system over a broad range of different gate durations.