Adiabatic quantum trajectories in engineered reservoirs

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.