Adiabatic quantum trajectories in engineered reservoirs

TL;DR

This paper investigates how engineered reservoirs can facilitate efficient adiabatic quantum state transfer, comparing their performance to unitary protocols and exploring potential advantages in non-Markovian regimes.

Contribution

It introduces optimized protocols for reservoir-assisted adiabatic state transfer and analyzes their efficiency, extending the theory of shortcuts to adiabaticity for open quantum systems.

Findings

Reservoir-engineered protocols can match the efficiency of optimal unitary dynamics.

Numerical results suggest potential advantages outside the Born-Markov approximation.

The study advances methods for quantum control in noisy, open systems.

Abstract

We analyze the efficiency of protocols for adiabatic quantum state transfer assisted by an engineered reservoir. The target dynamics is a quantum trajectory in the Hilbert space and is a fixed point of a time-dependent master equation in the limit of adiabatic dynamics. We specialize to quantum state transfer in a qubit and determine the optimal schedule for a class of time-dependent Lindblad equations. The speed limit on state transfer is extracted from a physical model of a qubit coupled to a reservoir, from which the Lindblad equation is derived in the Born-Markov limit. Our analysis shows that the resulting efficiency is comparable to the efficiency of the optimal unitary dynamics. Numerical studies indicate that reservoir-engineered protocols could outperform unitary protocols outside the regime of the Born-Markov master equation, namely, when correlations between the qubit and reservoir become relevant. Our study contributes to the theory of shortcuts to adiabaticity for open quantum systems and to the toolbox of protocols of the NISQ era.