The adiabatic theorem in quantum mechanics implies that if a system is in a discrete eigenstate of a Hamiltonian and the Hamiltonian evolves in time arbitrarily slowly, the system will remain in the corresponding eigenstate of the evolved Hamiltonian. Understanding corrections to the adiabatic result that arise when the evolution of the Hamiltonian is slow, but not arbitrarily slow, has become increasingly important, especially since adiabatic evolution has been proposed as a method of state preparation in quantum computing. This paper identifies two regimes, an adiabatic regime in which corrections are generically small and can depend on details of the evolution throughout the path and a hyperadiabatic regime in which the error is given by a form similar to an asymptotic expansion in the inverse of the evolution time with the coefficients depending principally on the behavior at the endpoints. However, the error in this hyperadiabatic regime is neither given by a true asymptotic series nor solely dependent on the endpoints: The coefficients combine the contributions from both endpoints, with relative phase factors that depend on the average spectral gaps along the trajectory, multiplied by the evolution time. The central result of this paper is to identify a quantity, referred to as the typical error, which is obtained by appropriately averaging the error over evolution times that are small compared to the evolution time itself. This typical error is characterized by an asymptotic series and depends solely on the endpoints of the evolution, remaining independent of the details of the intermediate evolution.
Abstract The viability of adiabatic quantum computation depends on the slow evolution of the Hamiltonian. The adiabatic switching theorem provides an asymptotic series for error estimates in 1/ T , based on the lowest nonzero derivative of the Hamiltonian and its eigenvalues at the endpoints. Modifications at the endpoints in practical implementations can modify this scaling behavior, suggesting opportunities for error reduction by altering endpoint behavior while keeping intermediate evolution largely unchanged. Such modifications can significantly reduce errors for long evolution times, but they may also require exceedingly long timescales to reach the hyperadiabatic regime, limiting their practicality. This paper explores the transition between the adiabatic and hyperadiabatic regimes in simple low-dimensional Hamiltonians, highlighting the impact of modifications of the endpoints on approaching the asymptotic behavior described by the switching theorem. Graphical abstract
We expand upon the standard quantum adiabatic theorem, examining the time-dependence of quantum evolution in the near-adiabatic limit. We examine a Hamiltonian that evolves along some fixed trajectory from
H^0 to
H^1 in a total evolution-time
τ, and our goal is to determine how the final state of the system depends on
τ. If the system is initialized in a non-degenerate ground state, the adiabatic theorem says that in the limit of large
τ, the system will stay in the ground state. We examine the near-adiabatic limit where the system evolves slowly enough that most but not all of the final state is in the ground state, and we find that the probability of leaving the ground state oscillates in
τ with a frequency determined by the integral of the spectral gap along the trajectory of the Hamiltonian, so long as the gap is big. If the gap becomes exceedingly small, the final probability is the sum of oscillatory behavior determined by the integrals of the gap before and after the small gap. We confirm these analytic predictions with numerical evidence from barrier tunneling problems in the context of quantum adiabatic optimization.
A new and intuitive perturbative approach to time-dependent quantum mechanics problems is presented, which is useful in situations where the evolution of the Hamiltonian is slow. The state of a system which starts in an instantaneous eigenstate of the initial Hamiltonian is written as a power series which has a straightforward diagrammatic representation. Each term of the series corresponds to a sequence of ``adiabatic'' evolutions, during which the system remains in an instantaneous eigenstate of the Hamiltonian, punctuated by transitions from one state to another. The first term of this series is the standard adiabatic evolution, the next is the well known first correction to it, and subsequent terms can be written down essentially by inspection. Although the final result is perhaps not terribly surprising, it seems to not be widely known, and the interpretation is new, as far as we know. Application of the method to the adiabatic approximation is given, and some discussion of the validity of this approximation is presented.
The adiabatic theorem is a powerful result concerning the evolution of quantum mechanical systems. Intuitively, it states the following: suppose we want to study the evolution of a quantum mechanical system governed by a given Hamiltonian
H (Def. 6.1), and the initial state of the system is the eigenstate of
H corresponding to its lowest eigenvalue. The laws of quantum physics tell us that the evolution of the system over time follows the Schrüdinger equation, Eq. (6.1). Suppose now that the Hamiltonian is not fixed, but rather, it changes very slowly over time, so that the evolution of the system is described by the differential equation
idtd∣ψ(t)⟩=H(t)∣ψ(t)⟩, and
H(t) is slowly changing. If, for any value of the time parameter
t, there is always a gap between the lowest eigenvalue of
H(t) and all other eigenvalues, then the adiabatic theorem asserts that the state of the system always remains in an eigenstate with the lowest eigenvalue throughout the evolution. One specific case of interest in this chapter occurs when the time-dependent Hamiltonian
H(t) varies from an initial (time-independent) Hamiltonian
HI to a final Hamiltonian
HF. If the change happens slowly, and the initial state of the system is an eigenstate of
HI with minimum eigenvalue, the adiabatic theorem asserts that the evolution eventually leads to the eigenstate with minimum eigenvalue of the final Hamiltonian
HF. This result can be used for optimization: imagine that the initial Hamiltonian encodes an easy problem for which we can construct the eigenstate with minimum eigenvalue, and the final Hamiltonian encodes a difficult optimization problem whose solution is given by the eigenstate with minimum eigenvalue. By the adiabatic theorem, evolving the eigenstate of the initial Hamiltonian while slowly changing the Hamiltonian into the final one leads to the solution of the difficult optimization problem. Of course we need to know how slowly
HI should be changed into
HF. The adiabatic theorem is at the heart of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), a framework that has been widely used to implement optimization algorithms on existing quantum hardware, because it has low requirements of quantum resources–although it does not guarantee improvements over classical algorithms in general. In this chapter we first discuss the adiabatic theorem, and then give an overview of QAOA.
We derive a version of the adiabatic theorem that is especially suited for applications in adiabatic quantum computation, where it is reasonable to assume that the adiabatic interpolation between the initial and final Hamiltonians is controllable. Assuming that the Hamiltonian is analytic in a finite strip around the real time axis, that some number of its time-derivatives vanish at the initial and final times, and that the target adiabatic eigenstate is non-degenerate and separated by a gap from the rest of the spectrum, we show that one can obtain an error between the final adiabatic eigenstate and the actual time-evolved state which is exponentially small in the evolution time, where this time itself scales as the square of the norm of the time-derivative of the Hamiltonian, divided by the cube of the minimal gap.
We derive a version of the adiabatic theorem that is especially suited for applications in adiabatic quantum computation, where it is reasonable to assume that the adiabatic interpolation between the initial and final Hamiltonians is controllable. Assuming that the Hamiltonian is analytic in a finite strip around the real-time axis, that some number of its time derivatives vanish at the initial and final times, and that the target adiabatic eigenstate is nondegenerate and separated by a gap from the rest of the spectrum, we show that one can obtain an error between the final adiabatic eigenstate and the actual time-evolved state which is exponentially small in the evolution time, where this time itself scales as the square of the norm of the time derivative of the Hamiltonian divided by the cube of the minimal gap.