Abstract:

The question of how to perform fast time-dependent drives is a critical issue across all quantum technologies. To date, there have largely been two methodologies that have been studied to overcome this issue: optimal control which manipulates additional control fields, and shortcuts to adiabaticity which mostly tries to enforce adiabatic dynamics in short times. I will outline a new approach we have developed, Counterdiabatic Optimised Local Driving (COLD), which combines aspects of optimal control and shortcuts to adiabaticity that complement each other. COLD essentially considers additional control fields with a local correction to the diabatic dynamics, this allows COLD to be combined with most numerical optimal control procedures. By using COLD we achieve substantial improvements beyond standard methods when applied to different annealing protocols and state preparation schemes, including when generating entanglement. Furthermore, I will discuss extensions of COLD, including how it can avoid the need to calculate the dynamics, as this is resource intensive for quantum many-body systems, which can be implemented even without correcting the diabatic dynamics (i.e. without implementing COLD).