Investigating the lower bound of minimum gate times using optimal control

Motivated by a bound derived in a recent work [C. Arenz, B. Russell, D. Burgarth and H. Rabitz, New J. Phys. 19 (2017) 103015], we apply optimal control theory to the dynamics of qubit systems, with the goal of investigating the lower bound of minimum gate times. In practice, we not only need to reach the desired unitary gates but we need to do so in a reasonable time (below the typical decoherence time). Therefore, we employ the recently introduced lower bound to estimate the minimum gate time and resort to numerical gate optimization in order to study the tightness of the obtained bound and our findings verify the relationship between the internal Hamiltonian and the minimum evolution time remarkably well. Finally, we discuss both challenges and ways forward for obtaining the same efficacy under realistic conditions.