Quantum entanglement is a key resource for quantum technologies, yet its efficient and high-fidelity generation remains a challenge due to the complexity of quantum dynamics. This paper presents a quantum optimal control framework to maximize bipartite entanglement within a fixed time horizon, under bounded control inputs. By leveraging Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle, we derive a set of necessary conditions that guide the design of time-dependent control fields to steer a two-qubit system toward maximally entangled Bell states. The entanglement is quantified using concurrence, and the control objective is formulated as maximizing this measure at the terminal time. Our approach is validated through numerical simulations of Liouville–von Neumann dynamics. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of switching-based control strategies in achieving robust entanglement, offering insights into practical implementations of quantum control for entanglement generation in quantum networks.

Reliable high-fidelity quantum state transformation has always been considered as an inseparable part of quantum information processing. In this regard, Pontryagin Minimum (or maximum) Principle (PMP) has proved to play an important role to achieve the maximum fidelity in an optimum time or energy. Motivated by this, in this work, we formulate a control constrained optimal control problem where we aim to minimize time and also energy subjected to a quantum system satisfying the bilinear Schrödinger equation. We derive the first order optimality conditions through the application of PMP resulting in a boundary value problem. Next, in order to obtain efficient numerical results, we exploit a particular family of physics-informed neural networks that are specifically designed to tackle the indirect method based on the PMP. We show that this method can significantly speed up the process by first obtaining a set of relations which finally let us compute the optimal control strategy to determine the time- and energy-optimal protocol driving a general initial state to a target state by a quantum Hamiltonian with bounded control. We make use of the so-called “qutip” package in python, and the newly developed “tfc” python package.