Control of a coupled two-spin system without hard pulses

Constructive techniques for preparing a specific unitary generator from a coupled two-spin system, via bounded amplitude radio frequency selective single spin pulses, are presented. The frequency of any pulse in the sequence is one of the two Larmor frequencies, while the phase takes one of two values. The fact that the amplitude is bounded implies that the Larmor frequency separation between the two spins need not be large to maintain selectivity. In addition, the contribution of the J coupling term to single spin evolution is not neglected, but instead plays a crucial role. The procedure is based on a certain decomposition of SU(4) available in the literature. A method for determining the parameters entering this factorization, in terms of the entries of the target unitary generator, is also provided.