Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2503.01958 · Physical Review Letters

Counterdiabatic Driving with Performance Guarantees

Jernej Rudi Finžgar, Simone Notarnicola, Madelyn Cain, Mikhail D. Lukin, Dries Sels

Published Sep 24, 2025• 8 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Counterdiabatic (CD) driving has the potential to speed up adiabatic quantum state preparation by suppressing unwanted excitations. However, existing approaches either require intractable classical computations or are based on approximations that do not have performance guarantees. We propose and analyze a nonvariational, system-agnostic CD expansion method and analytically show that it converges exponentially quickly in the expansion order. In finite systems, the required resources scale inversely with the spectral gap, which we argue is asymptotically optimal. To extend our method to the thermodynamic limit and suppress errors stemming from high-frequency transitions, we leverage finite-time adiabatic protocols. In particular, we show that a time determined by the quantum speed limit is sufficient to prepare the desired ground state, without the need to optimize the adiabatic trajectory. Numerical tests of our method on the quantum Ising chain show that our method can outperform state-of-the-art variational CD approaches.

DOI
10.1103/pqhl-nbtk

Related papers

Fighting Exponentially Small Gaps by Counterdiabatic Driving

András Grabarits, Federico Balducci, Adolfo del Campo

We investigate the efficiency of approximate counterdiabatic driving (CD) in accelerating adiabatic passage through exponentially small gaps. First, we analyze a minimal spin-glass bottleneck model that is analytically tractable and exhibits both an exponentially small gap at the transition point and a change in the ground state that involves a macroscopic rearrangement of spins. Using the variational Floquet-Krylov expansion to construct CD terms, we find that while the formation of excitations is significantly suppressed, achieving a fully adiabatic evolution remains challenging. Extending our investigation to realistic NP-hard spin-glass problems—specifically, the 3-regular and 3-—we find again that local CD expansions lead to negligible improvements in the final ground-state fidelity. These results highlight the limited impact of local CD methods in overcoming the bottlenecks associated with first-order quantum phase transitions. To address this limitation, we propose an alternative method, termed quantum brachistochrone counterdiabatic driving (QBCD), which employs the approximate full CD connecting the ground state and the first-excited state at a single-parameter value close to the critical point. In the minimal spin-glass model, QBCD enables exponentially faster adiabatic evolution than the local strategies. To alleviate the challenges of its experimental and classical implementation for realistic -hard problems, we exponentially reduce the nonlocality of the QBCD Hamiltonian by sparsifying its matrix elements to the density of the local expansions. Despite this drastic simplification, sparsified QBCD maintains finite ground-state fidelity at driving times exponentially shorter than in local strategies and counterdiabatic optimized local driving, demonstrating that even an exponentially reduced fraction of nonlocality near the critical point is sufficient to achieve significant speedup across spin-glass bottlenecks. At the same time, reduced nonlocality facilitates classical implementations via advanced numerical methods, while on quantum hardware its truncation serves as a resource-efficient approximation scheme for higher-order CD realizations.

arXiv:2410.02520•PRX Quantum•Nov 19, 2025•4 citations

Efficient paths for local counterdiabatic driving

Stewart Morawetz, Anatoli Polkovnikov

Local counterdiabatic driving (CD) provides a feasible approach for realizing approximate adiabatic or reversible processes like quantum state preparation using only local controls and without demanding excessively long protocol times. However, in many instances getting high accuracy of such CD protocols requires engineering very complicated new controls or pulse sequences. In this work, we describe a systematic method for altering the adiabatic path by adding extra local controls along which performance of local CD protocols is enhanced, both close to and far from the adiabatic limit. We also identify an iterative procedure to improve the performance of local counterdiabatic driving further without any knowledge of the quantum wave function. We then show that these methods provides dramatic improvement in the preparation of nontrivial Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger ground states of several different spin systems with both short-range and long-range interactions.

arXiv:2401.12287•Physical review. B./Physical review. B•Jul 2, 2024•21 citations

Quantum counterdiabatic driving enhanced by two-stage local control

Changhao Li, Jiayu Shen, Ruslan Shaydulin +1 more

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.

arXiv:2403.01854•Communications Physics•Aug 27, 2026•1 citation

Inertial Counterdiabatic Driving

Julián Ferreiro-Vélez, F. A. Cárdenas-López, F. Motzoi +1 more

We introduce an inertial counterdiabatic (CD) protocol that reformulates shortcut-to-adiabaticity design as a moving-frame diagonalization problem. The method employs the Magnus expansion to construct a variational propagator generated by an accessible CD ansatz. In the new rotating frame, the controls are optimized to suppress the off-diagonal Hamiltonian terms, and the CD terms are defined to counteract the corresponding inertial contribution. The propagator generated with the Magnus expansion naturally exploits additional control directions generated through its nested commutator, while the sequential design of the propagator introduces temporal nonlocality into the optimization. We benchmark the method on a two-qubit system and on the one-dimensional quantum Ising chain, where it consistently outperforms variational CD protocols based on action minimization. The largest improvements are observed near gap-closing regions, demonstrating the advantage of combining temporal and algebraic nonlocality for suppressing diabatic excitations.

quant-pharXiv:2610.08235•Oct 7, 2026•0 citations

Experimental Realization of Shortcuts to Adiabaticity in a Nonintegrable Spin Chain by Local Counterdiabatic Driving

Hui Zhou, Yunlan Ji, Xinfang Nie +4 more

Counterdiabatic driving (CD) offers a fast and robust strategy to manipulate and prepare the quantum state in multibody systems. However, the exact CD term involving the spectral properties of the system is difficult to calculate and generally takes a complicated form for higher-dimensional complex systems. Recently, Sels and Polkovnikov [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 114, E3909 (2017)] proposed a variational method to optimally approximate the CD term with no need for the full spectral information of the original Hamiltonian. Using a nuclear-magnetic-resonance setup, here we report an experimental demonstration of this method to construct available shortcuts to adiabaticity in a nonintegrable spin-$1/2$ chain via only local controls. In this process, the ground state of such a system is rapidly prepared and the final state fidelity is significantly increased compared with the traditional adiabatic method. Our experiments prove the feasibility of this variational method to design CD in practice, and thus it is a promising strategy for fast, high-fidelity quantum-state manipulation in complex and noisy quantum systems.

Physical Review Applied•Apr 23, 2020•41 citations

Optimizing counterdiabaticity by variational quantum circuits

Dan Sun, Pranav Chandarana, Zi‐Hua Xin +1 more

Using counterdiabatic (CD) driving-aiming at suppression of diabatic transition-in digitized adiabatic evolution has garnered immense interest in quantum protocols and algorithms. However, improving the approximate CD terms with a nested commutator ansatz is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a technique of finding optimal coefficients of the CD terms using a variational quantum circuit. By classical optimization routines, the parameters of this circuit are optimized to provide the coefficients corresponding to the CD terms. Then their improved performance is exemplified in Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state preparation on the nearest-neighbour Ising model. Finally, we also show the advantage over the usual quantum approximation optimization algorithm, in terms of fidelity with bounded time. This article is part of the theme issue 'Shortcuts to adiabaticity: theoretical, experimental and interdisciplinary perspectives'.

arXiv:2208.02087•Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences•Nov 6, 2022•16 citations
Counterdiabatic (CD) driving has the potential to speed up adiabatic quantum state preparation by suppressing unwanted excitations. However, existing approaches either require intractable classical computations or are based on approximations that do not have performance guarantees. We propose and analyze a nonvariational, system-agnostic CD expansion method and analytically show that it converges exponentially quickly in the expansion order. In finite systems, the required resources scale inversely with the spectral gap, which we argue is asymptotically optimal. To extend our method to the thermodynamic limit and suppress errors stemming from high-frequency transitions, we leverage finite-time adiabatic protocols. In particular, we show that a time determined by the quantum speed limit is sufficient to prepare the desired ground state, without the need to optimize the adiabatic trajectory. Numerical tests of our method on the quantum Ising chain show that our method can outperform state-of-the-art variational CD approaches.
We investigate the efficiency of approximate counterdiabatic driving (CD) in accelerating adiabatic passage through exponentially small gaps. First, we analyze a minimal spin-glass bottleneck model that is analytically tractable and exhibits both an exponentially small gap at the transition point and a change in the ground state that involves a macroscopic rearrangement of spins. Using the variational Floquet-Krylov expansion to construct CD terms, we find that while the formation of excitations is significantly suppressed, achieving a fully adiabatic evolution remains challenging. Extending our investigation to realistic NP-hard spin-glass problems—specifically, the 3-regular and 3-—we find again that local CD expansions lead to negligible improvements in the final ground-state fidelity. These results highlight the limited impact of local CD methods in overcoming the bottlenecks associated with first-order quantum phase transitions. To address this limitation, we propose an alternative method, termed quantum brachistochrone counterdiabatic driving (QBCD), which employs the approximate full CD connecting the ground state and the first-excited state at a single-parameter value close to the critical point. In the minimal spin-glass model, QBCD enables exponentially faster adiabatic evolution than the local strategies. To alleviate the challenges of its experimental and classical implementation for realistic -hard problems, we exponentially reduce the nonlocality of the QBCD Hamiltonian by sparsifying its matrix elements to the density of the local expansions. Despite this drastic simplification, sparsified QBCD maintains finite ground-state fidelity at driving times exponentially shorter than in local strategies and counterdiabatic optimized local driving, demonstrating that even an exponentially reduced fraction of nonlocality near the critical point is sufficient to achieve significant speedup across spin-glass bottlenecks. At the same time, reduced nonlocality facilitates classical implementations via advanced numerical methods, while on quantum hardware its truncation serves as a resource-efficient approximation scheme for higher-order CD realizations.
Local counterdiabatic driving (CD) provides a feasible approach for realizing approximate adiabatic or reversible processes like quantum state preparation using only local controls and without demanding excessively long protocol times. However, in many instances getting high accuracy of such CD protocols requires engineering very complicated new controls or pulse sequences. In this work, we describe a systematic method for altering the adiabatic path by adding extra local controls along which performance of local CD protocols is enhanced, both close to and far from the adiabatic limit. We also identify an iterative procedure to improve the performance of local counterdiabatic driving further without any knowledge of the quantum wave function. We then show that these methods provides dramatic improvement in the preparation of nontrivial Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger ground states of several different spin systems with both short-range and long-range interactions.
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.
We introduce an inertial counterdiabatic (CD) protocol that reformulates shortcut-to-adiabaticity design as a moving-frame diagonalization problem. The method employs the Magnus expansion to construct a variational propagator generated by an accessible CD ansatz. In the new rotating frame, the controls are optimized to suppress the off-diagonal Hamiltonian terms, and the CD terms are defined to counteract the corresponding inertial contribution. The propagator generated with the Magnus expansion naturally exploits additional control directions generated through its nested commutator, while the sequential design of the propagator introduces temporal nonlocality into the optimization. We benchmark the method on a two-qubit system and on the one-dimensional quantum Ising chain, where it consistently outperforms variational CD protocols based on action minimization. The largest improvements are observed near gap-closing regions, demonstrating the advantage of combining temporal and algebraic nonlocality for suppressing diabatic excitations.
Counterdiabatic driving (CD) offers a fast and robust strategy to manipulate and prepare the quantum state in multibody systems. However, the exact CD term involving the spectral properties of the system is difficult to calculate and generally takes a complicated form for higher-dimensional complex systems. Recently, Sels and Polkovnikov [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 114, E3909 (2017)] proposed a variational method to optimally approximate the CD term with no need for the full spectral information of the original Hamiltonian. Using a nuclear-magnetic-resonance setup, here we report an experimental demonstration of this method to construct available shortcuts to adiabaticity in a nonintegrable spin-1/21/21/2 chain via only local controls. In this process, the ground state of such a system is rapidly prepared and the final state fidelity is significantly increased compared with the traditional adiabatic method. Our experiments prove the feasibility of this variational method to design CD in practice, and thus it is a promising strategy for fast, high-fidelity quantum-state manipulation in complex and noisy quantum systems.
Using counterdiabatic (CD) driving-aiming at suppression of diabatic transition-in digitized adiabatic evolution has garnered immense interest in quantum protocols and algorithms. However, improving the approximate CD terms with a nested commutator ansatz is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a technique of finding optimal coefficients of the CD terms using a variational quantum circuit. By classical optimization routines, the parameters of this circuit are optimized to provide the coefficients corresponding to the CD terms. Then their improved performance is exemplified in Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state preparation on the nearest-neighbour Ising model. Finally, we also show the advantage over the usual quantum approximation optimization algorithm, in terms of fidelity with bounded time. This article is part of the theme issue 'Shortcuts to adiabaticity: theoretical, experimental and interdisciplinary perspectives'.