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Interference-engineered shortcut to high-fidelity state transfer via evolution-pause synthesis

Shuang Zhang, Yichuan Zhang, Xuanyu Liu, Zemeng Lin, Wange Song

Published Sep 2, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Fast, robust state transfer is essential for scalable integrated photonics and quantum information processing. We introduce evolution–pause synthesis (EPS), an interference-engineered shortcut that achieves high-fidelity transfer using only the native system Hamiltonian. EPS requires no auxiliary couplings or complex parameter detours; strategically interleaved pauses make transient excitations destructively interfere by closing their trajectories in complex amplitude space. We demonstrate EPS in Landau–Zener dynamics and multilevel STIRAP, achieving 11.8-fold acceleration over adiabatic transfer. Silicon photonic experiments realize high-fidelity transfer in a 16-μm footprint, nearly tenfold shorter than a 150-μm adiabatic reference, establishing EPS as a practical coherent-control framework.

DOI
10.1364/opticaopen.33406357

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•Jan 22, 2016•0 citations
Fast, robust state transfer is essential for scalable integrated photonics and quantum information processing. We introduce evolution–pause synthesis (EPS), an interference-engineered shortcut that achieves high-fidelity transfer using only the native system Hamiltonian. EPS requires no auxiliary couplings or complex parameter detours; strategically interleaved pauses make transient excitations destructively interfere by closing their trajectories in complex amplitude space. We demonstrate EPS in Landau–Zener dynamics and multilevel STIRAP, achieving 11.8-fold acceleration over adiabatic transfer. Silicon photonic experiments realize high-fidelity transfer in a 16-μm footprint, nearly tenfold shorter than a 150-μm adiabatic reference, establishing EPS as a practical coherent-control framework.
Fast, robust state transfer is essential for scalable integrated photonics and quantum information processing. We introduce evolution–pause synthesis (EPS), an interference-engineered shortcut that achieves high-fidelity transfer using only the native system Hamiltonian. EPS requires no auxiliary couplings or complex parameter detours; strategically interleaved pauses make transient excitations destructively interfere by closing their trajectories in complex amplitude space. We demonstrate EPS in Landau–Zener dynamics and multilevel STIRAP, achieving 11.8-fold acceleration over adiabatic transfer. Silicon photonic experiments realize high-fidelity transfer in a 16-μm footprint, nearly tenfold shorter than a 150-μm adiabatic reference, establishing EPS as a practical coherent-control framework.
Achieving fast, high-fidelity state transfer is fundamental to scalable integrated photonics and quantum information processing. While adiabatic evolution provides inherent robustness against control and fabrication imperfections, its requirement for slow driving leads to impractically long propagation distances in photonic circuits. Existing acceleration strategies, such as shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA), can dramatically shorten evolution times but generally rely on non-native auxiliary couplings or delicate Hamiltonian engineering that are difficult to implement in practice. Here we introduce evolution-pause synthesis (EPS), an interference engineered shortcut protocol that achieves fast, near-perfect state transfer strictly within the native system Hamiltonian. It achieves this by treating transient excitations as coherent resources and canceling their accumulated amplitudes via strategically interleaved pauses. By decoupling relative dynamical phase accumulation from parameter variations, EPS steers open transition trajectories into a closed loop in complex amplitude space, enabling perfect state transfer without auxiliary fields or complex parameter detours. We demonstrate this mechanism in Landau-Zener dynamics and extend it to a multilevel STIRAP process, achieving an 11.8-fold acceleration over the adiabatic baseline. Further, we experimentally validate EPS on a silicon photonic platform, realizing high-fidelity state transfer in a 16 μm16\,μ\mathrm{m}16μm footprint, a nearly tenfold reduction in device length compared with a 150 μm150\,μ\mathrm{m}150μm adiabatic reference. EPS offers a general hardware-compatible framework for fast, practical coherent control across wave and quantum platforms.
Abstract The multistate stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is an efficient technique to achieve a selective and accurate population transfer in a chainwise-linked system. However, their efficiency is imperfect due to the nonadiabatic losses from the long runtime of the adiabatic evolution. Here, we focus on realizing a perfect and robust coherent control of the quantum states with optimal shortcut to adiabaticity in a realistic five-state hybrid quantum system. In particular, the optimal shortcut field requires minimal additional coupling (only one coupling strength) to accelerate the adiabatic evolution in this five-state system. Compared to the original STIRAP, the optimal shortcut shows the ultra-high fidelity of quantum state manipulations even though the control parameters of the Hamiltonians are changed in different ways. Furthermore, we study the efficiency of the optimal shortcut field technique in the presence of various experimental errors, such as systematic error, Rabi frequency error, and coupling strength error, and it features a broad range of high efficiencies above 99.9%, showing its robustness against the above errors. The results might shed insight on the further applications of shortcuts to adiabaticity on robust quantum information processing in multi-level quantum systems.
The need for fast and robust quantum state transfer is an essential element in scalable quantum information processing, leading to widespread interest in shortcuts to adiabaticity for speeding up adiabatic quantum protocols. However, shortcuts to adiabaticity for systems with more than a few levels is occasionally challenging to compute in theory and frequently difficult to implement in experiments. In this paper, we develop a protocol for constructing shortcuts to adiabaticity through the multistate Landau-Zener approach and a stricter adiabatic condition. Importantly, our protocol only requires a few pieces of information about the energy spectrum and just adjusts the evolutionary rate of the system. It means that our protocol has broad applicability to theoretical models and does not require increasing the difficulty of the experiment. As examples, we apply our protocol to state transfer in the two-level Landau-Zener model, the non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, and the topological Thouless pump model and find that it can speed up the manipulation speed while remaining robust to Hamiltonian errors. Furthermore, based on the experimental friendliness of our findings, it can potentially be extended to many-body systems, dissipation cases, or Floquet processes. Overall, the proposed shortcut protocol offers a promising avenue for enhancing the efficiency and reliability of quantum state transfer protocols.
Accurate control of a quantum system is a fundamental requirement in many areas of modern science ranging from quantum information processing to high-precision measurements. A significantly important goal in quantum control is preparing a desired state as fast as possible, with sufficiently high fidelity allowed by available resources and experimental constraints. Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a robust way to realize high-fidelity state transfer but it requires a sufficiently long operation time to satisfy the adiabatic criteria. Here we theoretically propose and then experimentally demonstrate a shortcut-to-adiabatic protocol to speed-up the STIRAP. By modifying the shapes of the Raman pulses, we experimentally realize a fast and high-fidelity stimulated Raman shortcut-to-adiabatic passage that is robust against control parameter variations. The all-optical, robust and fast protocol demonstrated here provides an efficient and practical way to control quantum systems.
Accurate control of a quantum system is a fundamental requirement in many areas of modern science ranging from quantum information processing to high-precision measurements. A significantly important goal in quantum control is to prepare a desired state as fast as possible with sufficiently high fidelity allowed by available resources and experimental constraints. Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a robust way to realize high-fidelity state transfer but it requires a sufficiently long operation time to satisfy the adiabatic criteria. We here theoretically propose and then experimentally demonstrate a shortcut-to-adiabatic protocol to speed up the STIRAP. By modifying the shapes of the Raman pulses, we experimentally realize a fast and high-fidelity stimulated Raman shortcut-to-adiabatic passage that is robust against control parameter variations. The all-optical, robust, and fast protocol demonstrated here provides an efficient and practical way to control quantum systems.