Abstract
We derive a universal performance limit for coherent quantum control in the presence of modeled and unmodeled uncertainties. For any target unitary W that is implementable in the absence of error, we prove that the worst-case (and hence the average) gate fidelity obeys the lower bound F ≥ ( ), where is the gate duration and is a single frequency-like measure that aggregates \emph{all} bounded uncertainty sources, e.g., coherent control imperfections, unknown couplings, and residual environment interactions, without assuming an initially factorizable system-bath state or a completely positive map. The bound is obtained by combining an interaction-picture averaging method with a Bellman-Gronwall inequality and holds for any finite-norm Hamiltonian decomposition. Hence it applies equally to qubits, multi-level qudits, and ancilla-assisted operations. Because depends only on the dimensionless product , it yields a device-independent metric that certifies whether a given hardware platform can, in principle, reach a specified fault-tolerance threshold, and also sets a quantitative target for robust-control synthesis and system identification.