Inverse Design of Quantum States using the electromagnetic environment – When does the objective function needs to be fully quantum?

Inverse design is a strategy that often uses gradient based optimization schemes to automatically find system parameters, which extremizes a so-called objective function. They have proven very useful in nanophotonics applications over the past years and have been translated from the classical to the quantum regime.

A recent work by A. Miguel-Torcal et al. [1] investigated the generation of entanglement between two quantum emitters by optimizing the dielectric environment to maximize the concurrence [2] using the concurrence as the objective function.

We instead maximize the classical norm of the electric at emitter 2 due to emitter 1, extract the resulting coupling parameters, and solve the corresponding Lindblad equation. Our preliminary investigations indicate that a full quantum optimization might not always be necessary, motivating further study of when classical descriptions suffice and when quantum descriptions become essential.

[1] A. Miguel-Torcal, J. Abad-Arredondo, F. J. García-Vidal, and A. I. Fernández-Domínguez, Nanophotonics 11, 4387 (2022).

https://doi.org/10.1515/nanoph-2022-0231

[2] W. K. Wootters, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2245 (1998).

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.2245