No Arabic abstract
In multi-level systems, the commonly used adiabatic elimination is a method for approximating the dynamics of the system by eliminating irrelevant, non-resonantly coupled levels. This procedure is, however, somewhat ambiguous and it is not clear how to improve on it systematically. We use an integro-differential equation for the probability amplitudes of the levels of interest, which is equivalent to the original Schrodinger equation for all probability amplitudes. In conjunction with a Markov approximation, the integro-differential equation is then used to generate a hierarchy of approximations, in which the zeroth order is the adiabatic-elimination approximation. It works well with a proper choice of interaction picture; the procedure suggests criteria for optimizing this choice. The first-order approximation in the hierarchy provides significant improvements over standard adiabatic elimination, without much increase in complexity, and is furthermore not so sensitive to the choice of interaction picture. We illustrate these points with several examples.
We restate the adiabatic elimination approximation as the first term in a singular perturbation expansion. We use the invariant manifold formalism for singular perturbations in dynamical systems to identify systematic improvements on adiabatic elimination, connecting with well established quantum mechanical perturbation methods. We prove convergence of the expansions when energy scales are well separated. We state and solve the problem of hermiticity of improved effective hamiltonians.
We consider a composite open quantum system consisting of a fast subsystem coupled to a slow one. Using the time-scale separation, we develop an adiabatic elimination technique to derive at any order the reduced model describing the slow subsystem. The method, based on an asymptotic expansion and geometric singular perturbation theory, ensures the physical interpretation of the reduced second-order model by giving the reduced dynamics in a Lindblad form and the state reduction in Kraus map form. We give explicit second-order formulas for Hamiltonian or cascade coupling between the two subsystems. These formulas can be used to engineer, via a careful choice of the fast subsystem, the Hamiltonian and Lindbald operators governing the dissipative dynamics of the slow subsystem.
It was recently shown that, for solving NP-complete problems, adiabatic paths always exist without finite-order perturbative crossings between local and global minima, which could lead to anticrossings with exponentially small energy gaps if present. However, it was not shown whether such a path could be found easily. Here, we give a simple construction that deterministically eliminates all such anticrossings in polynomial time, space, and energy, for any Ising models with polynomial final gap. Thus, in order for adiabatic quantum optimization to require exponential time to solve any NP-complete problem, some quality other than this type of anticrossing must be unavoidable and necessitate exponentially long runtimes.
We consider a computational problem where the goal is to approximate the maximum eigenvalue of a two-local Hamiltonian that describes Heisenberg interactions between qubits located at the vertices of a graph. Previous work has shed light on this problems approximability by product states. For any instance of this problem the maximum energy attained by a product state is lower bounded by the Max Cut of the graph and upper bounded by the standard Goemans-Williamson semidefinite programming relaxation of it. Gharibian and Parekh described an efficient classical approximation algorithm for this problem which outputs a product state with energy at least 0.498 times the maximum eigenvalue in the worst case, and observe that there exist instances where the best product state has energy 1/2 of optimal. We investigate approximation algorithms with performance exceeding this limitation which are based on optimizing over tensor products of few-qubit states and shallow quantum circuits. We provide an efficient classical algorithm which achieves an approximation ratio of at least 0.53 in the worst case. We also show that for any instance defined by a 3- or 4-regular graph, there is an efficiently computable shallow quantum circuit that prepares a state with energy larger than the best product state (larger even than its semidefinite programming relaxation).
We consider an open quantum system described by a Lindblad-type master equation with two times-scales. The fast time-scale is strongly dissipative and drives the system towards a low-dimensional decoherence-free space. To perform the adiabatic elimination of this fast relaxation, we propose a geometric asymptotic expansion based on the small positive parameter describing the time-scale separation. This expansion exploits geometric singular perturbation theory and center-manifold techniques. We conjecture that, at any order, it provides an effective slow Lindblad master equation and a completely positive parameterization of the slow invariant sub-manifold associated to the low-dimensional decoherence-free space. By preserving complete positivity and trace, two important structural properties attached to open quantum dynamics, we obtain a reduced-order model that directly conveys a physical interpretation since it relies on effective Lindbladian descriptions of the slow evolution. At the first order, we derive simple formulae for the effective Lindblad master equation. For a specific type of fast dissipation, we show how any Hamiltonian perturbation yields Lindbladian second-order corrections to the first-order slow evolution governed by the Zeno-Hamiltonian. These results are illustrated on a composite system made of a strongly dissipative harmonic oscillator, the ancilla, weakly coupled to another quantum system.