Special Issue on Control of Quantum Mechanical Systems
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control · 2009
I T is perhaps not too surprising (at least for a control audi-ence) that “manipulating and controlling things at a small scale ” was already a key part of the program that Richard P. Feynman formulated in his 1959 visionary lecture [1] which is commonly recognized as the birth place of Quantum Informa-tion. Quoting from [1]: “The principles of Physics as far as I can see do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is some-thing, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big”. Fifty years later, if we are “small enough ” to store the “Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, ” we are still “too big ” to carry out Feynman pro-gram at the atomic scale, although we are getting closer. Get-ting closer, however, requires passing from nanotechnology to manipulating and controlling quantum systems, and this is no longer a question of scales, as quantum mechanics obeys its