The analytical expression for shortcuts to adiabaticity for any switching time and any thermally isolated system performing a finite-time and weakly driven process is presented. It is based on the analytical solution of the optimal protocols of weak processes for open systems. The extension to adiabatic processes was made by employing the concept of waiting time. The shortcuts to adiabaticity are proven by showing that the excess power is null in all instants, indicating that no nonequilibrium excitation occurs along the driving. Two examples are solved to verify the validity of such shortcuts: the typical case of an oscillatory relaxation function and the transverse-field quantum Ising chain. In this last case, it is shown that the nonquenching process outperforms the quenching one by suppressing the nonequilibrium excitations until the critical point is not achieved.
The analytical expression for shortcuts to adiabaticity for any switching time and any thermally isolated system performing a finite-time and weakly driven process is presented. It is based on the analytical solution of the optimal protocols of weak processes for open systems. The extension to adiabatic processes was made by employing the concept of waiting time. The shortcuts to adiabaticity are proven by showing that the excess power is null in all instants, indicating that no nonequilibrium excitation occurs along the driving. Two examples are solved to verify the validity of such shortcuts: the typical case of an oscillatory relaxation function and the transverse-field quantum Ising chain. In this last case, it is shown that the nonquenching process outperforms the quenching one by suppressing the nonequilibrium excitations until the critical point is not achieved.
The quantum Ising chain has shortcuts to adiabaticity when operated with weak processes. However, when exactly do the non-equilibrium effects of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, inherent to the system, appear in the optimal protocols in such a context? I propose here that such contrasting difference occurs due to the manner by which one measures the excitation spent energy of the system. Therefore, in this work, I made a qualitative analysis of a quantum annealing procedure of the time-averaged excess work, where the system acquires as a diverging decorrelation time the heuristic Kibble-Zurek mechanism relaxation time. Four important effects are then observed: the absence of shortcuts to adiabaticity, the pausing effect around the critical point in the optimal protocol when the Kibble-Zurek mechanism holds, the persistence of the time-averaged work to avoid slowly-varying regime even for large switching times, and diverging fluctuations of the time-averaged work. In the end, by comparing the excess and the time-averaged excess works, I conclude that this last one is not useful to measure the excitation spent energy in weak processes, although brings an intuition to what happens in the strong driving case.
A shortcut to adiabaticity is a finite-time process that produces the same final state as would result from infinitely slow driving. We show that such shortcuts can be found for weak perturbations from linear response theory. With the help of phenomenological response functions, a simple expression for the excess work is found-quantifying the nonequilibrium excitations. For two specific examples, i.e., the quantum parametric oscillator and the spin 1/2 in a time-dependent magnetic field, we show that finite-time zeros of the excess work indicate the existence of shortcuts. Finally, we propose a degenerate family of protocols, which facilitates shortcuts to adiabaticity for specific and very short driving times.
We study shortcuts to adiabaticity (STAs) through counterdiabatic driving in quantum critical systems in the presence of dissipation. We evaluate unitary as well as nonunitary controls, such that the system density matrix follows a prescribed trajectory corresponding to the eigenstates of a time-dependent reference Hamiltonian at any instant of time. The strength of the dissipator control term for the low-energy states shows universal scaling close to criticality. Using the example of free-fermionic systems, in particular, the transverse-field Ising model, we show that in contrast to STAs in closed quantum critical systems, here, STAs may require multibody interactions terms, even away from criticality, owing to the change in entropy of the time-dependent target state. Further, the associated heat current shows an extremum, while power dissipation changes curvature, close to criticality, and analogous to unitary control, no operational cost is associated with implementation of the exact counterdiabatic Hamiltonian. We believe the counterdiabatic protocol studied here could be of fundamental importance for understanding STAs in many-body open quantum systems and could be highly relevant for varied topics involving open many-body quantum systems, such as quantum computation and many-body quantum heat engines.
This thesis reports the results obtained during my PhD research in the field of out of equilibrium quantum many-body systems. Chapter 1 consists in a brief introduction of the field and the introduction of concept that are useful for the following chapters. In Chapter 2 the statistics of the work as a tool for characterizing the dynamics of many-body quantum systems is introduced its general features discussed. Then, such a statistics is computed for generic time-dependent protocols (both global and local) in the quantum Ising chain and in the Gaussian field theory, showing, in particular, that in its low-energy part there are features that are independent of the details of the specific chosen protocol. Chapter 3 is devoted to the study of the dynamical phase transition in the O(N) quantum vector model in the N→∞ limit, whose critical properties in generic dimensions are characterized. Moreover, a strong connection between such a transition and the statistics of excitations produced in a double quench as a function of the waiting time is showed. The chapter ends by studying the fate of the dynamical transition and the its critical properties when a ramp of finite duration τ is applied to the system instead of a sudden quench. In particular, we will show that when τ→∞ the critical point tends to the equilibrium critical point (at zero temperature) in a power-law fashion and that for every finite τ the critical properties are always the same (and different from the equilibrium critical properties). Finally in Chapter 4 we will discuss the emergence of a non adiabatic behavior in the dynamics of the order parameter for a low dimensional quantum system driven within a gapped phase by considering in detail the case of a quantum Ising chain subject to a linear variation in time of the transverse field, showing that, no matter how slowly the ramp is performed, such a change leads eventually to the disruption of the order.
Achieving effectively adiabatic dynamics in finite time is a ubiquitous goal in virtually all areas of modern physics. So-called shortcuts to adiabaticity refer to a set of methods and techniques that allow us to produce in a short time the same final state that would result from an adiabatic, infinitely slow process. In this paper we generalize one of these methods—the fast-forward technique—to driven Dirac dynamics. As our main result we find that shortcuts to adiabaticity for the -dimensional Dirac equation are facilitated by a combination of both scalar and pseudoscalar potentials. Our findings are illustrated for two analytically solvable examples, namely charged particles driven in spatially homogeneous and linear vector fields.
Achieving fast, excitation-free quantum control is a vital challenge in modern quantum technologies. In many cases, shortcuts to adiabaticity enable fast adiabatic-like protocols, yet determining control parameters that satisfy practical constraints is often challenging in complex systems. Here, we combine an analytical shortcut to adiabaticity approach with several numerical optimization methods to boost the performance of the protocol. As a proof-of-principle for this hybrid approach, we study a particularly intricate control problem, the separation of two trapped ions. We show that this analytical-numerical approach, along with the physical insight gained through the variety of suboptimal solutions, leads to the exploration of new solutions in a complex landscape that yield improvements of up to 3 orders of magnitude. Moreover, this improvement comes with no additional cost from an experimental point of view.