Constraint-native quantum control for fidelity--complexity trade-offs with inexact proximal ADMM

Abstract

Quantum-control pulses are often optimised for nominal fidelity before waveform constraints are imposed. This sequence can conceal the fidelity cost of producing smooth, band-limited, and amplitude-admissible controls. Here, we evaluate a constraint-native alternative based on inexact proximal alternating-direction updates. The formulation combines gate-infidelity minimisation with amplitude bounds, Fourier-domain bandwidth projection, amplitude sparsity, and total-variation regularisation. We compare it with GRAPE, standard Krotov optimisation, and L-BFGS-B on a single-qubit gate, a leakage-prone qutrit gate, and a two-qubit entangler without a directly controlled target generator. Random seeds are paired across methods, and qutrit computational-subspace fidelity is reported alongside leakage. PADMM-Warm reached mean qutrit and two-qubit fidelities of $0.6363$ and $0.9541$, respectively, while reducing total variation by factors of $13.2$ and $10.7$ relative to L-BFGS-B. These results define a reproducible fidelity--complexity trade-off, not a universal fidelity advantage. The method is therefore a numerical tool for exploring low-complexity control frontiers rather than a replacement for unconstrained high-fidelity solvers.