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Physical Review A

Adiabatic evolution of quantum-mechanical systems

Jorge Vidal, José Wudka

Published Nov 1, 1991• 12 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A description of the adiabatic approximation in terms of the time-evolution operator is presented. Corrections to the approximation are studied, and it is seen that these can be obtained in a simple way in the case of a rapidly oscillating Hamiltonian.
DOI
10.1103/physreva.44.5383

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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.
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Time evolution and adiabatic approximation in PTPTPT-symmetric quantum mechanics
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A condition on the Hamiltonian of an isospectral time-dependent quantum mechanical system is derived, which, if satisfied, implies optimal adiabaticity (defined later). The condition is expressed in terms of the Hamiltonian and the evolution operator related to it. Because the latter depends in a complicated way on the Hamiltonian, it is not yet clear how the condition can be used to extract useful information about the optimal Hamiltonian analytically. The condition is tested on an exactly-soluble time-dependent problem (a spin in a magnetic field), where perfectly adiabatic evolution can be easily identified.
The time-evolution operator for an explicitly time-dependent Hamiltonian is expressed as the product of a sequence of unitary operators. These are obtained by successive time-dependent unitary transformations of the Hilbert space followed by the adiabatic approximation at each step. The resulting adiabatic product expansion yields a generalization of the quantum adiabatic approximation. Furthermore, it leads to an infinite class of exactly solvable models. PACS number: 03.65.Bz Consider the dynamics of a quantum mechanical system whose Hamiltonian H = H(τ) is explicitly time-dependent. The evolution of a state vector |ψ(τ) 〉 is governed by the Schrödinger equation: i¯h | ˙ ψ(τ) 〉 = H(τ) |ψ(τ) 〉 , |ψ(0) 〉 = |ψ0 〉 , (1) where a dot means a time-derivative. Alternatively, one has |ψ(τ) 〉 = U(τ)|ψ0〉, where i τ − H(t) dt U(τ) = T e ¯h 0 (2) is the time-evolution operator. Here T denotes the time-ordering operator. The purpose of this article is to express U(τ) as the product of a sequence of unitary operators each of