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Physical Review A

Counterdiabatic transfer of a quantum state in a tunable Heisenberg spin chain via the variational principle

Yunlan Ji, Feifei Zhou, Xi Chen, Ran Liu, Zhaokai Li, Hui Zhou, Xinhua Peng

Published May 16, 2022• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a couple of counterdiabatic (CD) schemes for a rapid and high-fidelity transfer of quantum state across a one-dimensional spin chain, between two weakly coupled external qubits at each end. Employing the effective low-energy Hamiltonian of the system, we first construct the optimal CD terms based on the variational principle and then put forward two experimentally feasible shortcuts, which only need to manipulate couplings between the external qubits and chain. Compared to traditional adiabatic protocol, the resulting schemes allow a drastic increase in state-transfer fidelity in a short time. Furthermore, numerical simulation demonstrates that our speed-up protocols hold robustness against the imperfections of control fields and evolution time. The proposed schemes may be applicable to fast quantum-information transport in various spin-based physical systems.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.105.052422

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We present a couple of counterdiabatic (CD) schemes for a rapid and high-fidelity transfer of quantum state across a one-dimensional spin chain, between two weakly coupled external qubits at each end. Employing the effective low-energy Hamiltonian of the system, we first construct the optimal CD terms based on the variational principle and then put forward two experimentally feasible shortcuts, which only need to manipulate couplings between the external qubits and chain. Compared to traditional adiabatic protocol, the resulting schemes allow a drastic increase in state-transfer fidelity in a short time. Furthermore, numerical simulation demonstrates that our speed-up protocols hold robustness against the imperfections of control fields and evolution time. The proposed schemes may be applicable to fast quantum-information transport in various spin-based physical systems.
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.
Abstract Quantum state transfer (QST) plays a central role in the field of quantum computation and communication, but its quality will be deteriorated by the ubiquitous variations and noise in quantum systems. Here we propose robust and nonadiabatic protocols for transmitting quantum state across a strongly coupled spin chain, especially in the presence of unwanted disorders in the couplings. To this end, we approximately map the low-energy subspaces of the odd-size Heisenberg chain to a two-level system, and derive the sensitivity of the final fidelity with respect to systematic deviations or time-varying fluctuations. Subsequently, leveraging the flexibility of the inverse-engineering technique, we optimize the state-transfer robustness concerning these perturbations individually. The resulting schemes allow for more stable QST than the original accelerated schemes and only require manipulating the two boundary couplings instead of the whole system, which open up the possibility of fast and robust information transfer in spin-based quantum systems.
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.
Shortcuts to adiabaticity are well-known methods for controlling the quantum dynamics beyond the adiabatic criteria, where counterdiabatic (CD) driving provides a promising means to speed up quantum many-body systems. In this work, we show the applicability of CD driving to enhance the digitized adiabatic quantum computing paradigm in terms of fidelity and total simulation time. We study the state evolution of an Ising spin chain using the digitized version of the standard CD driving and its variants derived from the variational approach. We apply this technique in the preparation of Bell and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states with high fidelity using a very shallow quantum circuit. We implement this proposal on the IBM quantum computer, proving its usefulness for the speed up of adiabatic quantum computing in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.
Shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA) is a common protocol to realize high-fidelity and robust quantum control in various quantum systems. To date, STA has been widely applied in two- and three-level systems, whereas designing feasible strategies to achieve perfect quantum state engineering in multi-level systems still remains a challenging task. Here, we propose to use counterdiabatic (CD) driving and time-rescaling (TR) methods to construct multi-state stimulated Raman shortcut-to-adiabatic passage protocols for realizing robust and fast population transfer in chainwise-connected five-state systems. The first protocol is implemented by initially reducing the original five-state system to an equivalent two-state counterpart, and then designing the corresponding driving field by combining CD driving and unitary transformation. Further, we introduce the TR method to optimize the first protocol and thus offers an alternative solution. Numerical calculations show that both protocols can achieve complete population transfer and effectively suppress transient populations of all intermediate states. Compared with the first protocol, the optimized second exhibits better performance within a shorter evolution time.
Based on shortcuts to adiabaticity and quantum Zeno dynamics, we present a protocol to implement quantum state transfer (QST) in a quantum spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ chain. In the protocol, the complex Hamiltonian of an NNN-site system is simplified, and a simple effective Hamiltonian is present. It is shown that only the control of the coupling strengths between the boundary spins and the bulk spins are required for QST. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the protocol possesses high efficiency and is robust against the decay and the fluctuations of the control fields. The protocol might provide an alternative choice for transferring quantum states via spin chain systems.