A hardware-efficient quantum circuit can surrogate finite-horizon control, so classical optimization of its parameters yields high-fidelity multi-qubit state transfer without synthesizing time-dependent fields.

Summary. The manuscript proposes a variational framework for finite-horizon quantum control in which a hardware-efficient ansatz (HEA)—alternating layers of single-qubit rotations and entangling gates—serves as a surrogate parameterization of the terminal evolution. The control task of steering an initial state to a target over a fixed horizon is recast as classical optimization of the circuit parameters to minimize terminal infidelity, thereby avoiding explicit synthesis of time-dependent control fields and enforcement of Hamiltonian reachability constraints. The abstract asserts that numerical experiments on multi-qubit state-transfer benchmarks achieve high-fidelity transfer and illustrate trade-offs among ansatz expressivity, optimization complexity, and scalability with system size and circuit depth.

Significance. If the unshown numerical claims hold at competitive fidelities and practical depths, the work would supply a flexible, NISQ-oriented alternative to pulse-level optimal control (e.g., GRAPE/CRAB) and to physics-inspired ansätze, by treating the terminal map as a variational surrogate rather than a reachability-constrained dynamical system. That formulation is conceptually clean and implementation-friendly. Its significance, however, is entirely contingent on empirical demonstration that practical-depth HEAs are sufficiently expressive for the multi-qubit tasks and that the reported scaling and fidelities are competitive with established baselines; those results are not available in the text under review.