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arXiv:2006.04830 · Physical Review Research

Kibble-Zurek scaling in quantum speed limits for shortcuts to adiabaticity

Ricardo Puebla, Sebastian Deffner, Steve Campbell

Published Jul 20, 2020• 40 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Geometric quantum speed limits quantify the tradeoff between the rate at which quantum states can change and the resources that are expended during the evolution.Counterdiabatic driving is a unique tool from shortcuts to adiabaticity to speed up quantum dynamics while completely suppressing nonequilibrium excitations.We show that the quantum speed limit for counterdiabatically driven systems undergoing quantum phase transitions fully encodes the Kibble-Zurek mechanism by correctly predicting the transition from adiabatic to impulse regimes.Our findings are demonstrated for three scenarios, namely the transverse field Ising model, the Landau-Zener model, and the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.2.032020

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Geometric quantum speed limits quantify the tradeoff between the rate at which quantum states can change and the resources that are expended during the evolution.Counterdiabatic driving is a unique tool from shortcuts to adiabaticity to speed up quantum dynamics while completely suppressing nonequilibrium excitations.We show that the quantum speed limit for counterdiabatically driven systems undergoing quantum phase transitions fully encodes the Kibble-Zurek mechanism by correctly predicting the transition from adiabatic to impulse regimes.Our findings are demonstrated for three scenarios, namely the transverse field Ising model, the Landau-Zener model, and the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model.
We investigate the quench dynamics of an open quantum system involving a quantum phase transition. In the isolated case, the quench dynamics involving the phase transition exhibits a number of scaling relations with the quench rate as predicted by the celebrated Kibble-Zurek mechanism. In contact with an environment however, these scaling laws break down and one may observe an anti-Kibble-Zurek behavior: slower ramps lead to less adiabatic dynamics, increasing thus nonadiabatic effects with the quench time. In contrast to previous works, we show here that such anti-Kibble-Zurek scaling can acquire a universal form in the sense that it is determined by the equilibrium critical exponents of the phase transition, provided the excited states of the system exhibit singular behavior, as observed in fully connected models. This demonstrates novel universal scaling laws granted by a system-environment interaction in a critical system. We illustrate these findings in two fully connected models, namely, the quantum Rabi and the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick models. In addition, we discuss the impact of nonlinear ramps and finite-size systems.
Coherent control of complex many-body systems is critical to the development of useful quantum devices. Fast perfect state transfer can be exactly achieved through additional counterdiabatic fields. We show that the additional energetic overhead associated with implementing counterdiabatic driving can be reduced while still maintaining high target state fidelities. This is achieved by implementing control fields only during the impulse regime, as identified by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. We demonstrate that this strategy successfully suppresses most of the defects that would be generated due to the finite driving time for two paradigmatic settings: the Landau-Zener model and the Ising model. For the latter case, we also investigate the performance of our impulse control scheme when restricted to more experimentally realistic local control fields.
Transitionless quantum driving, also known as counterdiabatic driving, is a unique shortcut technique to adiabaticity, enabling a fast-forward evolution to the same target quantum states as those in the adiabatic case. However, as nothing is free, the fast evolution is obtained at the cost of stronger driving fields. Here, given the system initially gets prepared in equilibrium states, we construct relations between the dynamical evolution speed and the cost rate of transitionless quantum driving in two scenarios: one that preserves the transitionless evolution for a single energy eigenstate (individual driving), and the other that maintains all energy eigenstates evolving transitionlessly (collective driving). Remarkably, we find that individual driving may cost as much as collective driving, in contrast to the common belief that individual driving is more economical than collective driving in multilevel systems. We then present a potentially practical proposal to demonstrate the above phenomena in a three-level Landau-Zener model using the electronic spin system of a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond.
We propose an optimized adiabatic-impulse (OAI) protocol that substantially reduces the evolution time for crossing a quantum phase transition while preserving Kibble-Zurek (KZ) scaling. Near criticality, the control parameter is ramped linearly across the critical point at a rate characterized by a quench time τQτ_QτQ​. Away from criticality, the evolution remains adiabatic and is tuned close to the threshold of adiabatic breakdown, as quantified by an adiabatic coefficient ζζζ that scales as τQατ_Q^ατQα​. As a consequence, the total evolution time exhibits a sublinear power-law dependence on τQτ_QτQ​, and the conventional linear quench is recovered in the limit α→∞α\rightarrow\inftyα→∞. We apply the OAI protocol to the transverse Ising chain and numerically determine the minimal ζζζ required for KZ scaling. We further investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics in the presence of a noisy field that can induce anti-Kibble-Zurek (AKZ) behavior. Within the OAI protocol, noise-induced defects is significantly attenuated due to the shorter evolution time. The optimal quench time at which the defect density is minimized obeys an altered universal power-law scaling with the noise strength. Finally, we generalize the OAI protocol to the nonlinear quenches and numerically demonstrate a marked reduction in noise-induced defects.
The Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM) captures the key physics of nonequilibrium dynamics in second order phase transitions, and accurately predicts the density of topological defects formed in such processes. However, the central prediction of KZM--i.e., the scaling of the density of defects with the quench rate--still needs further experimental confirmation, particularly for quantum transitions. Here, we perform a quantum simulation of the nonequilibrium dynamics of the Landau-Zener model based on a nine-stage optical interferometer with an overall visibility of 0.975±0.008. The results support the adiabatic-impulse approximation, which is the core of Kibble-Zurek theory. Moreover, the developed high-fidelity multistage optical interferometer can support more complex linear optical quantum simulations.
Ideally, in an adiabatic quantum computation or quantum state preparation, a simple ground state of an initial Hamiltonian is evolved adiabatically to an interesting ground state of a final Hamiltonian. Unfortunately, the simple and the interesting are often different enough to be separated by a quantum phase transition. Due to a vanishing energy gap between the ground state and excited states at the critical point, near the transition the adiabaticity is bound to fail. This failure is quantified by a quantum version of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM). In these notes I introduce KZM in its general textbook form, based on adiabatic/impulse approximation, and then support the picture by an exact solution of the integrable transverse field quantum Ising chain and an approximate one of the non-integrable Bose-Hubbard model. The last model illustrates typical problems with adiabatic quantum state preparation that are encoutered in atomic quantum simulators.