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arXiv:2501.14881

Counterdiabatic-influenced Floquet-engineering: State preparation, annealing and learning the adiabatic gauge potential

Callum W. Duncan

Published Jan 24, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

Counterdiabatic driving, which enforces adiabatic evolution in arbitrary timescales, can be realised by engineering a Floquet Hamiltonian which oscillates between the Hamiltonian and its derivative requiring no additional control terms. However, the coefficients of the Floquet Hamiltoinan require knowledge of the counterdiabatic terms, which can be difficult to derive outside of a limited set of examples. We introduce a new hybrid technique for the control of quantum systems, Counterdiabatic-influenced Floquet-engineering or CAFFEINE for short. CAFFEINE parameterises the Floquet Hamiltonian for counterdiabatic driving and utilises numerical quantum optimal control in order to obtain the desired target state. This removes the need to both obtain and implement counterdiabatic terms, however, it does require the ability to quickly oscillate each term in the Hamiltonian. If this oscillation is possible, then CAFFEINE provides a framework to implement quantum annealing protocols and general quantum state preparation. We illustrate this through optimisation of two numerical examples of preparing a Bell state with two qubits and performing annealing protocols for the one-dimensional Ising model. Beyond this, we also illustrate CAFFEINE's capabilities to learn the counterdiabatic terms, which can potentially be used as a probe of quantum chaos and the geometry of quantum dynamics.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2501.14881

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Counterdiabatic driving, which enforces adiabatic evolution in arbitrary timescales, can be realised by engineering a Floquet Hamiltonian which oscillates between the Hamiltonian and its derivative requiring no additional control terms. However, the coefficients of the Floquet Hamiltoinan require knowledge of the counterdiabatic terms, which can be difficult to derive outside of a limited set of examples. We introduce a new hybrid technique for the control of quantum systems, Counterdiabatic-influenced Floquet-engineering or CAFFEINE for short. CAFFEINE parameterises the Floquet Hamiltonian for counterdiabatic driving and utilises numerical quantum optimal control in order to obtain the desired target state. This removes the need to both obtain and implement counterdiabatic terms, however, it does require the ability to quickly oscillate each term in the Hamiltonian. If this oscillation is possible, then CAFFEINE provides a framework to implement quantum annealing protocols and general quantum state preparation. We illustrate this through optimisation of two numerical examples of preparing a Bell state with two qubits and performing annealing protocols for the one-dimensional Ising model. Beyond this, we also illustrate CAFFEINE's capabilities to learn the counterdiabatic terms, which can potentially be used as a probe of quantum chaos and the geometry of quantum dynamics.
Counterdiabatic (CD) driving presents a way of generating adiabatic dynamics at an arbitrary pace, where excitations due to nonadiabaticity are exactly compensated by adding an auxiliary driving term to the Hamiltonian. While this CD term is theoretically known and given by the adiabatic gauge potential, obtaining and implementing this potential in many-body systems is a formidable task, requiring knowledge of the spectral properties of the instantaneous Hamiltonians and control of highly nonlocal multibody interactions. We show how an approximate gauge potential can be systematically built up as a series of nested commutators, remaining well defined in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, the resulting CD driving protocols can be realized up to arbitrary order without leaving the available control space using tools from periodically driven (Floquet) systems. This is illustrated on few- and many-body quantum systems, where the resulting Floquet protocols significantly suppress dissipation and provide a drastic increase in fidelity.
Periodically driven systems have emerged as a useful technique to engineer the properties of quantum systems, and are in the process of being developed into a standard toolbox for quantum simulation. An outstanding challenge that leaves this toolbox incomplete is the manipulation of the states dressed by strong periodic drives. The state-of-the-art in Floquet control is the adiabatic change of parameters. Yet, this requires long protocols conflicting with the limited coherence times in experiments. To achieve fast control of nonequilibrium quantum matter, we generalize the notion of variational counterdiabatic driving away from equilibrium focusing on Floquet systems. We derive a nonperturbative variational principle to find local approximations to the adiabatic gauge potential for the effective Floquet Hamiltonian. It enables transitionless driving of Floquet eigenstates far away from the adiabatic regime. We discuss applications to two-level, Floquet band, and interacting periodically driven models. The developed technique allows us to capture nonperturbative photon resonances and obtain high-fidelity protocols that respect experimental limitations like the locality of the accessible control terms.
Adiabatic protocols are employed across a variety of quantum technologies, from implementing state preparation and individual operations that are building blocks of larger devices, to higher-level protocols in quantum annealing and adiabatic quantum computation. The problem of speeding up these processes has garnered a large amount of interest, resulting in a menagerie of approaches, most notably quantum optimal control and shortcuts to adiabaticity. The two approaches are complementary: optimal control manipulates control fields to steer the dynamics in the minimum allowed time while shortcuts to adiabaticity aim to retain the adiabatic condition upon speed-up. We outline a new method which combines the two methodologies and takes advantage of the strengths of each. The new technique improves upon approximate local counterdiabatic driving with the addition of time-dependent control fields. We refer to this new method as counterdiabatic optimised local driving (COLD) and we show that it can result in a substantial improvement when applied to annealing protocols, state preparation schemes, entanglement generation and population transfer on a lattice. We also demonstrate a new approach to the optimisation of control fields which does not require access to the wavefunction or the computation of system dynamics. COLD can be enhanced with existing advanced optimal control methods and we explore this using the chopped randomised basis method and gradient ascent pulse engineering.
Periodically driven quantum systems have emerged as one of the most versatile tools for quantum simulation, enabling the engineering of effective Hamiltonians, topological phases, and inherently nonequilibrium phenomena such as discrete time crystals. Yet fundamental challenges persist: from a spectral ambiguity that precludes a unique Floquet ground state to an inability to manipulate Floquet eigenstates beyond the adiabatic regime. This thesis demonstrates that counterdiabatic driving—a technique from adiabatic quantum control—provides a unifying framework to address these challenges. We first show that the periodic lab-frame Hamiltonian generates counterdiabatic driving for the Floquet eigenstates, revealing Floquet theory as an inverse counterdiabatic driving problem. Exploiting this equivalence, we develop geometric Floquet theory: a reformulation based on the parallel-transport gauge, which uniquely decomposes Floquet dynamics into a geometric contribution, encoded in Berry phases, and a dynamical contribution, generated by the average-energy operator. The average-energy operator provides an unambiguous sorting of the quasienergy spectrum, identifies a unique Floquet ground state at all drive frequencies, and serves as a sensitive diagnostic for heating and symmetry-breaking transitions. Inherently nonequilibrium phenomena—the 𝜋-quasienergy splitting of discrete time crystals and the anomalous edge modes of Floquet topological insulators—are traced to geometric phases. On the practical side, we exploit the intrinsic robustness of prethermal discrete time crystals for a highly frequency-selective DTC-based AC magnetic field sensing scheme and demonstrate it experimentally on a nuclear spin quantum simulator. We then generalize counterdiabatic driving to periodically driven systems. In particular, we derive a non-perturbative variational principle for the Floquet adiabatic gauge potential; this yields local, experimentally feasible control protocols for transitionless manipulation of Floquet states. We demonstrate this formalism on Floquet state preparation in an ultracold atom quantum simulator and many-body state transfer across a quantum phase transition, with significant improvements over unassisted protocols in both cases.
Abstract Counterdiabatic driving can suppress diabatic losses during adiabatic ground state preparation. As its implementation necessitates the generation of an adiabatic gauge potential, which requires knowledge of the spectral gap of instantaneous Hamiltonians and involves highly non-local controls in many-body systems, local counterdiabatic driving with approximate adiabatic gauge potential has been widely adopted. In this work, using transverse-field Ising model as an example, we present an in-depth study of the performance of local counterdiabatic protocols and provide a closed-form analysis of ground-state-fidelity optimization. We then propose a two-stage protocol based on local counterdiabatic and simple local single-body control to further improve the performance. The practical implementation of these protocols does not require diagonalization of instantaneous Hamiltonians or spectral gaps, and only additional local single-body driving is involved. To benchmark their performance, we experimentally implement digitized adiabatic quantum evolution in a trapped-ion system. We characterize the quality of the prepared states and explore the scaling behavior with system size up to 14 qubits. Our demonstration of quantum shortcut to adiabaticity opens a path towards preparing ground states of complex systems with accessible local controls.
Counterdiabatic driving provides a universal route to fast quantum control, but its standard formulation presupposes a Hamiltonian generator. We develop a Hamiltonian-free theory of the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) for parameter-dependent unitary operators UλU_λUλ​. Exact and regularized versions of the AGP follow from a Hermitian, banded linear system at a cost comparable to the Lanczos construction in the Hermitian case, requiring neither diagonalization nor a matrix logarithm. We demonstrate rapid convergence of the truncated Krylov approximation for the kicked top and for an integrable brickwork circuit built from unitary Rˇ\check{R}Rˇ matrices, a setting in which no local effective Hamiltonian is available. Our results extend shortcuts to adiabaticity, and AGP-based diagnostics of chaos, to Floquet systems and quantum circuits.