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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

The adiabatic limit and the semiclassical limit

Michael Berry

Published Apr 21, 1984• 88 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The evolution mod Psi (t)) of a system with slowly-varying Hamiltonian H( Omega t) depends not only on the slowness parameter Omega but also on Planck's constant h(cross). For systems with two (or more) classically separated phase-space regions which are quantally connected by tunnelling, the curves of instantaneous energy levels display hyperbolic near-degeneracies rather than crossings. In such cases the limits Omega to 0 (h(cross) fixed and small) and h(cross) to 0 ( Omega fixed and small) lead to opposite behaviour of mod Psi (t)). As an illustration, the uniform semiclassical adiabatic behaviour ( Omega and h(cross) small, Omega /h(cross) arbitrary) is calculated exactly for a double-well potential for which one well gets shallower as the other gets deeper.

DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/17/6/018

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The evolution mod Psi (t)) of a system with slowly-varying Hamiltonian H( Omega t) depends not only on the slowness parameter Omega but also on Planck's constant h(cross). For systems with two (or more) classically separated phase-space regions which are quantally connected by tunnelling, the curves of instantaneous energy levels display hyperbolic near-degeneracies rather than crossings. In such cases the limits Omega to 0 (h(cross) fixed and small) and h(cross) to 0 ( Omega fixed and small) lead to opposite behaviour of mod Psi (t)). As an illustration, the uniform semiclassical adiabatic behaviour ( Omega and h(cross) small, Omega /h(cross) arbitrary) is calculated exactly for a double-well potential for which one well gets shallower as the other gets deeper.
Quantum-mechanical evolution in a slowly varying double-well potential is analyzed in the semiclassical limit to determine the transition probability due to loss of adiabatic invariance of states having energy close to that of a separatrix in the equivalent classical system. Transformation to the rotating-axis basis reduces the problem to the integration of a set of coupled differential equations. In the adiabatic limit the integration is carried out by the method of successive approximations. For adiabatic parameter \ensuremath{\epsilon} of the order of the inverse, 1/N, of the number of quantum states with energy below the separatrix, the spread of the quantum adiabatic invariant is exponentially small in the inverse of the adiabaticity parameter. Surprisingly, the transition to this quantum adiabatic behavior occurs far below the minimum transition frequency of the system.
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\hat{H}_0H^0​ to H^1\hat{H}_1H^1​ in a total evolution-time τττ, and our goal is to determine how the final state of the system depends on τττ. If the system is initialized in a non-degenerate ground state, the adiabatic theorem says that in the limit of large τττ, 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 τττ 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 semiclassical connection is established between quantal and classical properties of a system whose Hamiltonian is slowly cycled by varying its parameters round a circuit. The quantal property is a geometrical phase shift gamma n associated with an eigenstate with quantum numbers n=(n l ); the classical property is a shift Delta theta l (I) in the lth angle variable for motion round a phase-space torus with actions I=(I l ); the connection is Delta theta l =- delta gamma / delta n l . Two applications are worked out in detail: the generalised harmonic oscillator, with quadratic Hamiltonian whose parameters are the coefficients of q 2 , qp and p 2 ; and the rotated rotator, consisting of a particle sliding freely round a non-circular hoop slowly turned round once in its own plane.
The adiabatic theorem states that an initial eigenstate of a slowly varying Hamiltonian remains close to an instantaneous eigenstate of the Hamiltonian at a later time. We show that a perfunctory application of this statement is problematic if the change in eigenstate is significant, regardless of how closely the evolution satisfies the requirements of the adiabatic theorem. We also introduce an example of a two-level system with an exactly solvable evolution to demonstrate the inapplicability of the adiabatic approximation for a particular slowly varying Hamiltonian.