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Shortcuts To Adiabaticity: Theory and Application

Xi Chen

Published Jan 1, 2012• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

By definition, quantum adiabatic process means a slow process which allows the state to follow the instantaneous eigenstates of time-dependent Hamiltonian. For some reasons, for example, to avoid the decoherence effects, or to implement large-scale quantum information processing, we may want to speed up the adiabatic process, that is, to achieve the adiabatic-like control but in very short time. In this talk, we present new methods to speeded-up expansion and transport of cold atoms in a harmonic trap. Such shortcuts to adiabaticity provide the fast expansion or transport, in which the final atomic state is the same as in the adiabatic process, but in arbitrarily short time, keeping the same populations of vibrational levels in the initial and final trap. These methods can also be generalized to Bose-Einstein Condensates. Moreover, we present shortcuts to adiabatic passage from one internal atomic state to another in twoor three-level atoms. In detail, we can apply Berry’s transitionless quantum driving method and invariant-based inverse engineering method to accelerate the Rapid Adiabatic Passage (RAP) and Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) in twoand three-level atomic systems, respectively. We also examine and compare the stability of different schemes concerning different types of noise and system errors. Finally, we show that the technique of shortcuts to adiabaticity in two-level system can be applied in fast and robust spin flip in a quantum dot, to avoid the decoherent effects.

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By definition, quantum adiabatic process means a slow process which allows the state to follow the instantaneous eigenstates of time-dependent Hamiltonian. For some reasons, for example, to avoid the decoherence effects, or to implement large-scale quantum information processing, we may want to speed up the adiabatic process, that is, to achieve the adiabatic-like control but in very short time. In this talk, we present new methods to speeded-up expansion and transport of cold atoms in a harmonic trap. Such shortcuts to adiabaticity provide the fast expansion or transport, in which the final atomic state is the same as in the adiabatic process, but in arbitrarily short time, keeping the same populations of vibrational levels in the initial and final trap. These methods can also be generalized to Bose-Einstein Condensates. Moreover, we present shortcuts to adiabatic passage from one internal atomic state to another in twoor three-level atoms. In detail, we can apply Berry’s transitionless quantum driving method and invariant-based inverse engineering method to accelerate the Rapid Adiabatic Passage (RAP) and Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) in twoand three-level atomic systems, respectively. We also examine and compare the stability of different schemes concerning different types of noise and system errors. Finally, we show that the technique of shortcuts to adiabaticity in two-level system can be applied in fast and robust spin flip in a quantum dot, to avoid the decoherent effects.
Quantum adiabatic processes—that keep constant the populations in the instantaneous eigenbasis of a time-dependent Hamiltonian—are very useful to prepare and manipulate states, but take typically a long time. This is often problematic because decoherence and noise may spoil the desired final state, or because some applications require many repetitions. "Shortcuts to adiabaticity" are alternative fast processes which reproduce the same final populations, or even the same final state, as the adiabatic process in a finite, shorter time. Since adiabatic processes are ubiquitous, the shortcuts span a broad range of applications in atomic, molecular, and optical physics, such as fast transport of ions or neutral atoms, internal population control, and state preparation (for nuclear magnetic resonance or quantum information), cold atom expansions and other manipulations, cooling cycles, wavepacket splitting, and many-body state engineering or correlations microscopy. Shortcuts are also relevant to clarify fundamental questions such as a precise quantification of the third principle of thermodynamics and quantum speed limits. We review different theoretical techniques proposed to engineer the shortcuts, the experimental results, and the prospects.
Different methods have been recently put forward and implemented experimentally to inverse engineer the time-dependent Hamiltonian of a quantum system and accelerate slow adiabatic processes via nonadiabatic shortcuts. In the ``transitionless quantum driving'' proposed by Berry, shortcut Hamiltonians are designed so that the system follows exactly, in an arbitrarily short time, the approximate adiabatic path defined by a reference Hamiltonian. A different approach is based on first designing a Lewis-Riesenfeld invariant to carry the eigenstates of a Hamiltonian from specified initial to final configurations, again in an arbitrary time, and then constructing from the invariant the transient Hamiltonian that connects these boundary configurations. We show that the two approaches, apparently quite different in form and so far in results, are, in fact, strongly related and potentially equivalent, so that the inverse-engineering operations in one of them can be reinterpreted and understood in terms of the concepts and operations of the other one. We study, as explicit examples, expansions of time-dependent harmonic traps and the state preparation of two-level systems.
Abstract Robust quantum control is essential for the development of quantum computers, which rely on precise manipulation of qubits. One form of quantum control is stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), which ordinarily is a state transfer protocol but was extended by Kis and Renzoni (2002 Phys. Rev. A 65 032318) to perform qubit rotations. Shortcut methods to adiabaticity for STIRAP have been shown to speed up adiabatic processes, beyond the adiabatic criterion, with high fidelity. Here, we apply shortcut to adiabaticity methods to the STIRAP qubit rotation scheme to improve the performance of quantum logic gates. The scheme can be implemented via direct connections between ground states in a 4-level Λ system or effective connections in a 5-level Λ system with modified pulses that implement transitionless quantum driving via the addition of a counterdiabatic driving term. We show that the extended shortcut to adiabaticity method serves to improve the fidelity of qubit rotations in the diabatic regime.