We are submitting this proposal to request NSF support for a Quantum Control Summer School, to be held 8-14 August 2005 at the California Institute of Technology. This school is being organized in response to burgeoning interest among physicists, engineers and applied mathematicians in exploring the principles and applications of control in systems whose behavior is manifestly quantum mechanical. The lectures will be addressed mainly to graduate students and senior researchers who are just getting started in the field, but will include some advanced presentations to provide some perspective on research frontiers. We have already secured seed funding for the summer school from Caltech's initiative in Information Science and Technology, but we are seeking additional support from government agencies including the NSF and AFOSR. Intellectual merit: Control theory is a central discipline in modern engineering, but so far there has been only preliminary research on extending its constitutive methodologies to incorporate quantum dynamics and measurement. Applications areas for quantum control theory range from protein structure determination to precision measurement and metrology, and deep connections have been identified with the field of quantum computation. We anticipate that this summer school can play a critical role in stimulating the development of quantum control, as it has the enthusiastic support of important constituencies in control theory, mathematical physics, atomic physics, quantum optics and condensed matter physics. Broader impact: This summer school will provide a unique educational experience for both students and senior researchers who attend. Its topic is inherently interdisciplinary and has sufficiently strong intellectual appeal to draw the attention of leading researchers in both engineering and pure physics. It seems reasonable to hope that events of this kind will spur a synthesis of quantum physics, dynamical systems theory and probability theory in the same way that early workshops on quantum computation facilitated the development of a common language for physicists and computer scientists.
