Many-body quantum state control in the presence of environmental noise

We consider the quantum state control of a multi-state system which evolves an initial state into a target state. We explicitly demonstrate the control method in an interesting case involving the transfer and rotation of a Schr\"{o}dinger cat state through a coupled harmonic oscillator chain at a predetermined time $T$. We use the gradient-based Krotov's method to design the time-dependent parameters of the coupled chain to find an optimal control shape that will evolve the system into a target state. We show that the prescribed quantum state control can be achieved with high fidelity, and the robustness of the control against generic environment noises is explored. Our findings will be of interest for the optimal control of a many-body open quantum system in the presence of environmental noise.