Adiabatic limit is the presumption of the adiabatic geometric quantum computation and of the adiabatic quantum algorithm. But in reality, the variation speed of the Hamiltonian is finite. Here we develop a general formulation of adiabatic quantum computing, which accurately describes the evolution of the quantum state in a perturbative way, in which the adiabatic limit is the zeroth-order approximation. As an application of this formulation, nonadiabatic correction or error is estimated for several physical implementations of the adiabatic geometric gates. A quantum-computing process consisting of many adiabatic gate operations is considered, for which the total nonadiabatic error is found to be about the sum of those of all the gates. This is a useful constraint on the computational power. The formalism is also briefly applied to the adiabatic quantum algorithm.
Adiabatic limit is the presumption of the adiabatic geometric quantum computation and of the adiabatic quantum algorithm. But in reality, the variation speed of the Hamiltonian is finite. Here we develop a general formulation of adiabatic quantum computing, which accurately describes the evolution of the quantum state in a perturbative way, in which the adiabatic limit is the zeroth-order approximation. As an application of this formulation, nonadiabatic correction or error is estimated for several physical implementations of the adiabatic geometric gates. A quantum-computing process consisting of many adiabatic gate operations is considered, for which the total nonadiabatic error is found to be about the sum of those of all the gates. This is a useful constraint on the computational power. The formalism is also briefly applied to the adiabatic quantum algorithm.
A different way to realize nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation is proposed by varying parameters in the Hamiltonian for nuclear-magnetic resonance, where the dynamical and geometric phases are implemented separately without the usual operational process. Therefore the phase accumulated in the geometric gate is a pure geometric phase for any input state. In comparison with the conventional geometric gates by rotating operations, our approach simplifies experimental implementations making them robust to certain experimental errors. In contrast to the unconventional geometric gates, our approach distinguishes the total and geometric phases and offers a wide choice of the relations between the dynamical and geometric phases.
Quantum computation has been shown to be superior to classical computation in solving some problems, and therefore can substantially change our life. However, the realization of quantum computation is still challenging, even if quantum technologies have been improved significantly. Two main obstacles to the realization of practical quantum computation are control errors and decoherence. Control errors are caused by inaccurate manipulations of quantum systems and decoherence is caused by the inevitable interaction between the system and its environment. Geometric phases are only dependent on evolution paths of quantum systems but independent of the evolution details and therefore quantum computation based on geometric phases, i.e., geometric quantum computation, is robust against control errors, benefiting the realization of practical quantum computation. The early proposals of geometric quantum computation are based on adiabatic geometric phases. These proposals require quantum systems to undergo adiabatic evolution, which makes quantum systems evolve for a long time. To circumvent this, nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation based on nonadiabatic Abelian geometric phases was proposed soon after. In 2012, nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation based on nonadiabatic non-Abelian geometric phases was proposed, which also circumvents long-time evolutions. Moreover, compared with nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation that uses the geometric phase as one parameter of a quantum gate, nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation uses the holonomic matrix itself as a quantum gate. This makes nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation possess whole-geometric property. Due to the merits of both geometric robustness and high-speed implementation without the limit of adiabatic evolution, nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation has been attracting much attention. Until now, much progress has been achieved in the field of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation. On one hand, various methods have been proposed to design more efficient nonadiabatic holonomic gates. Nonadiabatic holonomic gates were first realized by using resonant laser fields to drive a three-level system. After this, the single-shot proposal and the single-loop proposal were proposed, allowing us to realize one-qubit gates by a shorter path and thereby reducing the exposure time of nonadiabatic holonomic gates to the environment. To further shorten the exposure time, the path-shortening protocol was put forward, where nonadiabatic holonomic gates can be realized based on a class of extended evolution paths that are shorter than the former ones. Recently, a general approach of constructing Hamiltonians for nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation was put forward, by using which one can easily find a Hamiltonian making the quantum system evolve along a desired path so that nonadiabatic holonomic gates can be realized with an economical evolution time. On the other hand, various methods have been proposed to combine nonadiabatic holonomic gates and various decoherence-resilient methods, making the resulting schemes robust against both control errors and decoherence. The first proposal in this aspect is combining nonadiabatic holonomic gates and decoherence-free subspaces. Gradually, proposals combining nonadiabatic holonomic gates with noiseless subsystems, dynamical decoupling and surface codes were put forward. Last but not least, various proposals suitable for specific physical systems have been proposed and particularly various experimental platforms have been used to demonstrate nonadiabatic holonomic gates. This also significantly improves the development of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation. In this paper, we review the above research advances on nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation, aiming to help readers understand the main developments of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation.
This Thesis focuses on different aspects of quantum computation theory: adiabatic quantum algorithms, decoherence during the adiabatic evolution and quantum simulators. After an overview on the area of quantum computation and setting up the formal ground for the rest of the Thesis we derive a general error estimate for adiabatic quantum computing. We demonstrate that the first-order correction, which has frequently been used as a condition for adiabatic quantum computation, does not yield a good estimate for the computational error. Therefore, a more general criterion is proposed, which includes higher-order corrections and shows that the computational error can be made exponentially small – which facilitates significantly shorter evolution times than the first-order estimate in certain situations. Based on this criterion and rather general arguments and assumptions, it can be demonstrated that a run-time of order of the inverse minimum energy gap is sufficient and necessary. Furthermore, exploiting the similarity between adiabatic quantum algorithms and quantum phase transitions, we study the impact of decoherence on the sweep through a second-order quantum phase transition for the prototypical example of the Ising chain in a transverse field and compare it to the adiabatic version of Grover’s search algorithm. It turns out that (in contrast to first-order transitions) the impact of decoherence caused by a weak coupling to a rather general environment increases with system size (i.e., number of spins/qubits), which might limit the scalability of the system. Finally, we propose the use of electron systems to construct laboratory systems based on present-day technology which reproduce and thereby simulate the quantum dynamics of the Ising model and the O(3) nonlinear sigma model.
A nonadiabatic geometric quantum gate is realized by integrating nonadiabatic geometric phases with global geometric features into the unitary quantum control, thereby removing the limitation of a long evolution time in the adiabatic case. However, systematic errors are inevitable in practical quantum control; these lead to the deviation of the evolution from target conditions to inducing geometric phases, smearing the robustness of the induced geometric quantum gates. Here, we present a general theoretical framework with enhanced robustness for geometric quantum gates by preserving fundamental geometric conditions. We first analytically evaluate the influence of systematic errors on geometric gates and then propose an optimized approach to mitigate this influence. Numerical simulations indicate that, as the geometric conditions are still maintained in the presence of systematic errors in our scheme, the constructed geometric quantum gates exhibit strong robustness, far superior to that of conventional schemes. Furthermore, we propose implementing the scheme in superconducting quantum circuits, where geometric quantum gates can achieve high fidelity with current experimental parameters. Therefore, the enhanced gate performance highlights the promise of our scheme for large-scale quantum computations.
In adiabatic quantum computing the aim is to track an eigenstate as the Hamiltonian changes. In the usual setup this is achieved using the natural time-dependent Hamiltonian evolution of the system and the main technical tool is the adiabatic theorem. We propose several alternative processes that achieve the same goal, but can easily be implemented on a gate-based quantum computer without the overhead of simulating time-dependent Hamiltonian evolution. We give a general framework for deriving `adiabatic' theorems for these processes.
As an application, we give various algorithms for solving the Quantum Linear Systems Problem (QLSP) with optimal scaling in the condition number. One of these algorithms was previously developed in [Cunningham, Roland 2024] and another can be seen as a randomised version of the discrete adiabatic algorithm of [Costa et al. 2022].
We also describe versions of Trotterisation in our framework, which allows several results from [An et al. 2025] to be reproduced in a randomised setting. In particular, bounds on the Trotter error in terms of the fidelity are obtained that are asymptotically better than the standard bounds.
Geometric phases are used to construct quantum gates since it naturally resists local noises, acting as the modularized units of geometric quantum computing. Meanwhile, fast nonadiabatic geometric gates are required for reducing the information loss induced by decoherence. Here, we propose a digital simulation of nonadiabatic geometric quantum gates in terms of shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA). More specifically, we combine the invariant-based inverse engineering with optimal control theory for designing the fast and robust Abelian geometric gates against systematic error, in the context of two-level qubit systems. We exemplify X and T gates, in which the fidelities and robustness are evaluated by simulations in ideal quantum circuits. Our results can also be extended to constructing two-qubit gates, for example, a controlled-PHASE gate, which shares the equivalent effective Hamiltonian with rotation around the Z-axis of a single qubit. These STA-inspired nonadiabatic geometric gates can realize quantum error correction physically, leading to fault-tolerant quantum computing in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era.