Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2013
This paper is concerned with the internal distributed control problem for the 1DSchrödinger equation,i ut(x,t) = −uxx+α(x) u+m(u) u, that arises in quantum semiconductor models. Here m(u)is a non local Hartree–type nonlinearity stemming from the coupling with the 1D Poissonequation, and α(x) is a regular function with lineargrowth at infinity, including constant electric fields. By means of both the HilbertUniqueness Method and the contraction mapping theorem it is shown that for initial andtarget states belonging to a suitable small neighborhood of the origin, and fordistributed controls supported outside of a fixed compact interval, the model equation iscontrollable. Moreover, it is shown that, for distributed controls with compact support,the exact controllability problem is not possible.