Steady state engineering of a two-level system by the mixed-state inverse engineering scheme.

The mixed-state inverse engineering scheme is a control scheme used for engineering the quantum state of a driven open quantum system from an initial steady state to a final steady state. In this paper, we present an analytical study of this scheme applied to the driven two-level model coupled to a heat reservoir. Typically, when the purity of the quantum state varies, incoherent control techniques are required for mixed-state engineering. However, we show that for both Markovian and non-Markovian dynamics, coherent control protocols can transfer the quantum state into the target state. This simplification comes at a cost, as the evolution of the quantum state must be limited to restricted conditions, resulting in special trajectories in its Hilbert space that connect the initial and target states.