21–26 Jun 2026
U. Ottawa - Learning Crossroads (CRX) Building
America/Toronto timezone
Welcome to the 2026 CAP Congress Program website! / Bienvenue au siteweb du programme du Congrès de l'ACP 2026!

Spin Magnetometry with Reinforcement Learning

25 Jun 2026, 14:45
15m
U. Ottawa - Learning Crossroads (CRX) Building

U. Ottawa - Learning Crossroads (CRX) Building

100 Louis-Pasteur Private, Ottawa, ON K1N 9N3
Oral (Non-Student) / Orale (non-étudiant(e)) Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, Canada / Physique atomique, moléculaire et photonique, Canada (DAMOPC-DPAMPC) (DAMOPC) R1-3 | (DPAMPC)

Speaker

Dr Logan Cooke (University of Ottawa)

Description

Quantum sensors achieve measurement precisions well beyond classical bounds, though in order to reach such sensitivities methods for quantum optimal control are often employed, particularly in systems where decoherence is important; however, optimizing the control of quantum sensors is made difficult by the fact that not all Hamiltonian parameters are known. Here we investigate the use of reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal control of a spin magnetometer, wherein a single spin evolves according to an unknown background field. We apply the soft actor-critic RL algorithm to learn a policy, from which a set of transverse control fields may be sampled to improve the sensitivity of the magnetometer in time, in the presence of decoherence. The agent is trained so as to maximize the quantum Fisher information of the spin with respect to the unknown field. We train the agent on numerical simulations of the system, and then apply the resulting agent to various conditions not seen in training. We find that the agent is sensitive to certain changes in the system Hamiltonian, but overall is able to generalize well, supporting the use of such algorithms in quantum optimal control problems.

Keyword-1 Quantum Sensing
Keyword-2 Quantum Optimal Control
Keyword-3 Reinforcement Learning

Author

Dr Logan Cooke (University of Ottawa)

Co-author

Stefanie Czischek (University of Ottawa)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.