Inverse engineering for robust state transport along a spin chain via low-energy subspaces

Abstract

Quantum state transfer (QST) plays a central role in the field of quantum computation and communication, but its quality will be deteriorated by the ubiquitous variations and noise in quantum systems. Here we propose robust and nonadiabatic protocols for transmitting quantum state across a strongly coupled spin chain, especially in the presence of unwanted disorders in the couplings. To this end, we approximately map the low-energy subspaces of the odd-size Heisenberg chain to a two-level system, and derive the sensitivity of the final fidelity with respect to systematic deviations or time-varying fluctuations. Subsequently, leveraging the flexibility of the inverse-engineering technique, we optimize the state-transfer robustness concerning these perturbations individually. The resulting schemes allow for more stable QST than the original accelerated schemes and only require manipulating the two boundary couplings instead of the whole system, which open up the possibility of fast and robust information transfer in spin-based quantum systems.

Keywords

• shortcuts to adiabaticity
• quantum state transfer
• spin chains