Abstract
We address the problem of cooling a Markovian quantum system to a pure state in the shortest amount of time possible. Here the system drift takes the form of a Lindblad master equation and we assume fast unitary control. This setting allows for a natural reduction of the control system to the eigenvalues of the state density matrix. We give a simple necessary and sufficient characterization of systems which are (asymptotically) coolable and present a powerful result which allows to considerably simplify the search for optimal cooling solutions. With these tools at our disposal we derive explicit provably time-optimal cooling protocols for rank one qubit systems, inverted Λ-systems on a qutrit, and a certain system consisting of two coupled qubits.