The relationship between the Landau-Zener model (which describes transitions between energy levels for a time-dependent Hamiltonian) and non-secular master equations is discussed. This approach allows to describe the widely discussed in the literature on quantum photosynthesis resonance of the energy of the vibron and the difference of exciton energies for transitions between exciton states coupled to the vibron.
We give a general definition for the tunneling time in the Landau-Zener model. This definition allows us to compute numerically the Landau-Zener tunneling time at any sweeping rate without ambiguity. We have also obtained analytical results in both the adiabatic limit and the sudden limit. Whenever applicable, our results are compared to previous results and they are in good agreement.
We consider the Landau-Zener problem for a Bose-Einstein condensate in a linearly varying two-level system, for the full many-particle system as well and in the mean-field approximation. The many-particle problem can be solved approximately within an independent crossings approximation, which yields an explicit Landau-Zener formula.
We show that, by means of a right-unitary transformation, the fully quantized Landau-Zener Hamiltonian in the weak-coupling regime may be solved by using known solutions from the standard Landau-Zener problem. In the strong-coupling regime, where the rotating wave approximation is not valid, we show that the quantized Landau-Zener Hamiltonian may be diagonalized in the atomic basis by means of a unitary transformation; hence allowing numerical solutions for the few photons regime via truncation.
Geometric quantum manipulation and Landau-Zener interferometry have been separately explored in many quantum systems. In this Letter, we combine these two approaches to study the dynamics of a superconducting phase qubit. We experimentally demonstrate Landau-Zener interferometry based on the pure geometric phases in this solid-state qubit. We observe the interference caused by a pure geometric phase accumulated in the evolution between two consecutive Landau-Zener transitions, while the dynamical phase is canceled out by a spin-echo pulse. The full controllability of the qubit state as a funct…
We demonstrate quantum coherent control of a single electron spin in a NV center in diamond using the Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg interferometry at room temperature. Interference pattern is observed oscillating as a function of microwave frequency. The decays in the visibility of the interference are well explained by numerical simulation which includes the thermal fluctuations of the nuclear bath which shows that Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg interferometry can be used for probing electron spin decoherence processes.
We investigate the fundamental limits in precision allowed by quantum mechanics from Landau-Zener transitions, concerning Hamiltonian parameters. While the Landau-Zener transition probabilities depend sensitively on the system parameters, much more precision may be obtained using the acquired phase, quantified by the quantum Fisher information. This information scales with a power of the elapsed time for the quantum case, whereas it is time-independent if the transition probabilities alone are used. We add coherent control to the system, and increase the permitted maximum precision in this tim…
We study the dynamics of a spin coupled to an oscillating magnetic field, in the presence of decoherence and dissipation. In this context we solve the master equation for the Landau-Zener problem, both in the unitary and in the irreversible case. We show that a single spin can be "magnetized" in the direction parallel to the oscillating bias. When decay from upper to lower level is taken into account, hysteretic behavior is obtained.
We experimentally investigate a discrete time quantum walk in a system of coupled fiber loops and observe typical phenomena known from the wave propagation in periodic structures as ballistic spreading or an oscillation between two internal quantum states similar to Zitterbewegung (trembling motion). If a position-dependent phase gradient is applied we find localization and Bloch oscillations of the field for moderate as well as Landau-Zener tunneling for strong phase gradients.
We report the first experimental realization of the geometric Landau-Zener-Stückelberg (LZS) interferometry proposed by [Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 207002 (2011)] in a single trapped ion system. Different from a conventional LZS interferometer, the interference fringes of our geometric interferometer originate solely from geometric phase. We also observe the robustness of the interference contrast against noise or fluctuation in the experimental parameters. Our scheme can be applied to other complex systems subject to relatively large errors in system control.
We study the effect of Landau-Zener (LZ) tunneling caused by the varying sweeping rate of external field, formulating and approximately solving the problem with many levels of the LZ tunneling rate. Comparing with the steadily vary about sweeping field, the LZ tunneling rate will be essentially changed because of the unsteady variation of the sweeping field in time. Thus could help us to make the particles with in lower states transit periodically to upper states within the finite time.
Landau-Zener physics is often exploited to generate quantum logic gates and to perform state initialization and readout. The quality of these operations can be degraded by noise fluctuations in the energy gap at the avoided crossing. We leverage a recently discovered correspondence between qubit evolution and space curves in three dimensions to design noise-robust Landau-Zener sweeps through an avoided crossing. In the case where the avoided crossing is purely noise-induced, we prove that operations based on monotonic sweeps cannot be robust to noise. Hence, we design families of phase gates b…
Population transfer in quantum systems has always been an interesting area in physics since the introduction of quantum mechanics. In this paper, transition probabilities for a coupled system consisting of four two - level particles are studied by solving Landau - Zener Hamiltonian. The effects of the first and second nearest neighbors interactions are investigated. Presented results indicate that the second nearest neighbors interactions will decrease the transition probability when the coupling strength for each neighborhood has the same sign. The fast sweep effect on transition probability …
The degenerate Landau-Zener-Majorana-Stückelberg model consists of two degenerate energy levels whose energies vary with time and in the presence of an interaction which couples the states of the two levels. In the adiabatic limit, it allows for the populations transfer from states of one level to states of the other level. The presence of an interaction with the environment influences the efficiency of the process. Nevertheless, identification of possible decoherence-free subspaces permits to engineer coupling schemes for which quantum noise can be minimized.
We proposed an analytical model to analyze the Landau-Zener interference in a multilevel superconducting flux qubit driven by large amplitude external fields. Our analytical results agree remarkably with those of the experiment [Nature 455, 51 (2008)]. Moreover, we studied the effect of driving-frequency and dephasing rate on the interference. The dephasing generally destroys the interference while increasing frequency rebuilds the interference at large dephasing rate. At certain driving frequency and dephasing rate, the interference shows some anomalous features as observed in recent experime…
The exact analytical solution of the degenerate Landau-Zener model, wherein two bands of degenerate energies cross in time, is presented. The solution is derived by using the Morris-Shore transformation, which reduces the fully coupled system to a set of independent nondegenerate two-state systems and a set of decoupled states. Due to the divergence of the phase of the off-diagonal element of the propagator in the original Landau-Zener model, not all transition probabilities exist for infinite time duration. In general, apart from some special cases, only the transition probabilities between s…
Non-Hermitian quantum systems with explicit time dependence are of ever-increasing importance. There are only a handful of models that have been analytically studied in this context. Here, a PT-symmetric non-Hermitian $N$-level Landau-Zener type problem with two exceptional points of $N$th order is introduced. The system is Hermitian for asymptotically large times, far away from the exceptional points, and has purely imaginary eigenvalues between the exceptional points. The full Landau-Zener transition probabilities are derived, and found to show a characteristic binomial behaviour. In the adi…
We propose a universal analytical method to study the dynamics of a multi-anticrossing system subject to driving by one single large-amplitude triangle pulse, within its time scales smaller than the dephasing time. Our approach can explain the main features of the Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg interference patterns recently observed in a tripartite system [Nature Communications 1:51 (2010)]. In particular, we focus on the effects of the size of anticrossings on interference and compare the calculated interference patterns with numerical simulations. In addition, Fourier transform of the patterns ca…
Employing the time-dependent variational principle combined with the multiple Davydov $\mathrm{D}_2$ Ansatz, we investigate Landau-Zener (LZ) transitions in a qubit coupled to a photon mode with various initial photon states at zero temperature. Thanks to the multiple Davydov trial states, exact photonic dynamics taking place in the course of the LZ transition is also studied efficiently. With the qubit driven by a linear external field and the photon mode initialized with Schrödinger-cat states, asymptotic behavior of the transition probability beyond the rotating-wave approximation is uncove…
We investigate Landau-Zener processes modeled by a two-level quantum system, with its finite bias energy varied in time and in the presence of a single broadened cavity mode at zero temperature. By applying the hierarchy equation method to the Landau-Zener problem, we computationally study the survival fidelity of adiabatic states without Born, Markov, rotating-wave or other perturbative approximations. With this treatment it also becomes possible to investigate cases with very strong system-bath coupling. Different from a previous study of infinite-time Landau-Zener processes, the fidelity of…
Quantum computation by the adiabatic theorem requires a slowly varying Hamiltonian with respect to the spectral gap. We show that the Landau-Zener-Stückelberg oscillation phenomenon, that naturally occurs in quantum two level systems under non-adiabatic periodic drive, can be exploited to find the ground state of an N dimensional Grover Hamiltonian. The total runtime of this method is $O(\sqrt{2^n})$ which is equal to the computational time of the Grover algorithm in the quantum circuit model. An additional periodic drive can suppress a large subset of Hamiltonian control errors using coherent…
We study the Landau-Zener transition with the quantum Zeno effect in an open dissipative system populated by a large number of bosons. Given the quantum Zeno effect is strong enough, both discrete and continuous quantum Zeno measurements are found to stabilize the Landau-Zener transition. Both the $σ^x$-type longitudinal relaxation and $σ^z$-type transverse relaxation in the bosonic system are analyzed as a model of continuous quantum Zeno measurements. While both of them improve the signal-to-noise ratio in terms of the ground state population, the $σ^x$-type relaxation can further boost meas…
The Landau-Zener(LZ) transition of a two-level system coupling to spin chains near their critical points is studied in this paper. Two kinds of spin chains, the Ising spin chain and XY spin chain, are considered. We calculate and analyze the effects of system-chain coupling on the LZ transition. A relation between the LZ transition and the critical points of the spin chain is established. These results suggest that LZ transitions may serve as the witnesses of criticality of the spin chain. This may provide a new way to study quantum phase transitions as well as LZ transitions.
Fast and robust quantum state transfer (QST) is a major requirement in quantum control and in scalable quantum information processing. Topological protection has emerged as a promising route for the realization of QST robust against sizable imperfections in the network. Here we present a scheme for robust QST of topologically protected edge states in a dimeric Su-Schrieffer-Heeger spin chain assisted by Landau-Zener tunneling. As compared to topological QST protocols based on Rabi flopping proposed in recent works, our method is more advantageous in terms of robustness against both diagonal an…
The Landau-Zener formula provides an analytical expression for the final excitation of a quantum system after passage of an avoided crossing of two energy levels. If the two levels correspond to a ground state, and to an excited state which is subject to radiative decay, the probability of exciting the system by adiabatic passage of the level crossing is reduced. In this article we use a stochastic master equation to study the level crossing dynamics when the system is subject to continuous probing of the emitted radiation. The measurement backaction on the system associated with the fluctuati…
We study the influence of off-diagonal harmonic noise on transitions in a Landau-Zener model. We demonstrate that the harmonic noise can change the transition probabilities substantially and that its impact depends strongly on the characteristic frequency of the noise. In the underdamped regime of the noise process, its effect is compared with the one of a deterministic sinusoidally oscillating function. While altering the properties of the noise process allows one to engineer the transitions probabilities, driving the system with a deterministic sinusoidal function can result in larger and mo…
We investigate the dynamics of a Bose--Einstein condensate (BEC) in a triple-well trap in a three-level approximation. The inter-atomic interactions are taken into account in a mean-field approximation (Gross-Pitaevskii equation), leading to a nonlinear three-level model. New eigenstates emerge due to the nonlinearity, depending on the system parameters. Adiabaticity breaks down if such a nonlinear eigenstate disappears when the parameters are varied. The dynamical implications of this loss of adiabaticity are analyzed for two important special cases: A three level Landau-Zener model and the S…
We present a method to perform fault-tolerant single-qubit gate operations using Landau-Zener tunneling. In a single Landau-Zener pulse, the qubit transition frequency is varied in time so that it passes through the frequency of the radiation field. We show that a simple three-pulse sequence allows eliminating errors in the gate up to the third order in errors in the qubit energies or the radiation frequency.
We calculate the exact Landau-Zener transitions probabilities for a qubit with arbitrary linear coupling to a bath at zero temperature. The final quantum state exhibits a peculiar entanglement between the qubit and the bath. In the special case of a diagonal coupling, the bath does not influence the transition probability, whatever the speed of the Landau-Zener sweep. It is proposed to use Landau-Zener transitions to determine both the reorganization energy and the integrated spectral density of the bath. Possible applications include circuit QED and molecular nanomagnets.
By considering a quantum critical Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model we analyze a new type of Landau-Zener transitions where the population transfer is mediated by interaction rather than from a direct diabatic coupling. For this scenario, at a mean-field level the dynamics is greatly influenced by quantum interferences. In particular, regardless of how slow the Landau-Zener sweep is, for certain parameters almost no population transfer occurs, which is in stark contrast to the regular Landau-Zener model. For moderate system sizes, this counterintuitive mean-field behaviour is not duplicated in the qu…
Several ways are discussed how to control the Landau-Zener tunneling in the Wannier-Stark system. We focus on a realization of this system with interacting and noninteracting ultracold bosons. The tunneling from the ground band to the continuum is shown to depend crucially on the initial condition and system parameters and, more interestingly, on added timedependent disorder -- noise -- on the lattice beams.
We study Landau-Zener transitions in a dissipative environment by means of the quasiadiabatic propagator path-integral scheme. It allows to obtain numerically exact results for the full range of the involved parameters. We discover a nonmonotonic dependence of the Landau-Zener transition probability on the sweep velocity which is explained in terms of a simple physical picture. This feature results from a nontrivial competition between relaxation processes and the external sweep and is not captured by perturbative approaches. In addition to the Landau-Zener transition probability, we study the…
A comprehensive theory of the Landau-Zener transition in quadratic nonlinear two-state systems is developed. A compact analytic formula involving elementary functions only is derived for the final transition probability. The formula provides a highly accurate approximation for the whole rage of the variation of the Landau-Zener parameter.
Under resonant conditions, a long sequence of landau-zener transitions can lead to Rabi oscillations. Using a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center spin in diamond, we investigated the interference between more than 100 Landau-Zener processes. We observed the new type of Rabi oscillations of the electron spin resulting from the interference between successive Landau-Zener processes in various regimes, including both slow and fast passages. The combination of the control techniques and the favorable coherent properties of NV centers provides an excellent experimental platform to study a variety of quant…
Motivated by recent cold atom experiments in optical lattices, we consider a lattice version of the Landau-Zener problem. Every single site is described by a Landau-Zener problem, but due to particle tunnelling between neighboring lattice sites this onsite single particle Landau-Zener dynamics couples to the particle motion within the lattice. The lattice, apart from having a dephasing effect on single site Landau-Zener transitions, also implies, in the presence of a confining trap, an inter-site particle flow induced by the Landau-Zener sweeping. This gives rise to an interplay between intra-…
We present a derivation of the Landau-Zener solution through the explicit evaluation of the time ordered propagator. The result is exact and does not involve the solution of the differential equation for the spin amplitudes.
We demonstrate quantum control and entanglement generation using a Landau-Zener beam splitter formed by coupling two transmon qubits to a superconducting cavity. Single passage through the cavity-mediated qubit-qubit avoided crossing provides a direct test of the Landau-Zener transition formula. Consecutive sweeps result in Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg interference patterns, with a visibility that can be sensitively tuned by adjusting the level velocity through both the non-adiabatic and adiabatic regimes. Two-qubit state tomography indicates that a Bell state can be generated via a single passage…
The purpose of this article is to address the dynamics of an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate confined in coupled one-dimensional Landau-Zener arrays under the influence of disorder and harmonic confinement. In particular, we concentrate in studying the interplay of disorder and interparticle interaction on the transfer of atoms depending on the speed of Landau-Zener sweeps. A dynamical phase diagram summarizing the final situation across ground state and inverse sweeps is given in terms of the effect of disorder, interaction and the speed of the sweeps.
We report time-resolved measurements of Landau-Zener tunneling of Bose-Einstein condensates in accelerated optical lattices, clearly resolving the step-like time dependence of the band populations. Using different experimental protocols we were able to measure the tunneling probability both in the adiabatic and in the diabatic bases of the system. We also experimentally determine the contribution of the momentum width of the Bose condensates to the width of the tunneling steps and discuss the implications for measuring the jump time in the Landau-Zener problem.
I present a simple algorithm based on a type of partial reverse-engineering that generates an unlimited number of exact analytical solutions to the Schrodinger equation for a general time-dependent two-level Hamiltonian. I demonstrate this method by deriving new exact solutions corresponding to fast control pulses that contain arbitrarily many tunable parameters. It is shown that the formalism is naturally suited to generating analytical control protocols that perform precise non-adiabatic rapid passage and Landau-Zener interferometry near the quantum speed limit. A general, exact formula for …
We study the S-matrix for the transitions at an avoided crossing of several energy levels, which is a multilevel generalization of the Landau-Zener problem. We demonstrate that, by extending the Schroedinger evolution to complex time, one can obtain an exact answer for some of the transition amplitudes. Similar to the Landau-Zener case, our result covers both the adiabatic regime (slow evolution.) and the diabatic regime (fast evolution). The form of the exact transition amplitude coincides with that obtained in a sequential pairwise level crossing approximation, in accord with the conjecture …
The Landau-Zener model of a quantum mechanical two-level system driven with a linearly time dependent detuning has served over decades as a textbook paradigm of quantum dynamics. In their seminal work [L. D. Landau, Physik. Z. Sowjet. 2, 46 (1932); C. Zener, Proc. Royal Soc. London 137, 696 (1932)], Landau and Zener derived a non-perturbative prediction for the transition probability between two states, which often serves as a reference point for the analysis of more complex systems. A particularly intriguing question is whether that framework can be extended to describe many-body quantum dyna…
We present a detailed analysis of the Landau-Zener problem for an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate in a time-varying double-well trap, especially focussing on the relation between the full many-particle problem and the mean-field approximation. Due to the nonlinear self-interaction a dynamical instability occurs, which leads to a breakdown of adiabaticity condition and thus fundamentally alters the dynamics. It is shown that essentially all features of the Landau-Zener problem including the depletion of the condensate mode can be already understood within a semiclassical phase space pictur…
We consider the Landau-Zener problem for a multilevel quantum system that is coupled to an external environment. In particular, we consider a number of cases of three-level systems coupled to a harmonic oscillator that represents the external environment. We find that, similar to the case of the Landau-Zener problem with a two-level system, when the quantum system and the environment are both initially in their ground states the probability that the system remains in the same quantum state is not affected by the coupling to the environment. The final occupation probabilities of the other state…
Since the pioneering works by Landau, Zener, Stückelberg, and Majorana (LZSM), it has been known that driving a quantum two-level system results in tunneling between its states. Even though the interference between these transitions is known to be important, it is only recently that it became both accessible, controllable, and useful for engineering quantum systems. Here, we study systematically various aspects of LZSM physics and review the relevant literature, significantly expanding the review article in [Shevchenko, S. N., S. Ashhab, and F. Nori (2010), "Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interferom…
We derive an analog of the Landau-Zener adiabatic tunneling formula for an open, two-level system coupled to a memoryless, dephasing bath. The derivation rests on a geometric view of the spectral subspaces as adiabatic invariants.
We study the interband Landau-Zener tunneling of a quantum particle in the Hall configuration, i.e., in the presence of normal to the lattice plane gauge field (for example, magnetic field for a charged particle) and in-plane potential field (electric field for a charged particle). The interband tunneling is induced by the potential field and for vanishing gauge field is described by the common Landau-Zener theory. We generalize this theory for non-zero gauge field. The depletion rates of low-energy bands are calculated by using semi-analytical method of the truncated Floquet matrix.
Stimulated by the experimental realization of spin-dependent tunneling via gradient magnetic field [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 225301 (2013); Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 185301 (2013)], we investigate dynamics of Bloch oscillations and Landau-Zener tunneling of single spin-half particles in a periodic potential under the influence of a spin-dependent constant force. In analogy to the Wannier-Stark system, we call our system as the Wannier-Zeeman system. If there is no coupling between the two spin states, the system can be described by two crossing Wannier-Stark ladders with opposite tilts. The spatial c…
It is shown that dynamics of the Landau-Zener model can be accurately described in terms of the Kibble-Zurek theory of the topological defect production in nonequilibrium phase transitions. The simplest quantum model exhibiting the Kibble-Zurek mechanism is presented. A new intuitive description of Landau-Zener dynamics is found.
Quantum systems are prone to decoherence due to both intrinsic interactions as well as random fluctuations from the environment. Using the Pechukas-Yukawa formalism, we investigate the influence of noise on the dynamics of an adiabatically evolving Hamiltonian which can describe a quantum computer. Under this description, the level dynamics of a parametrically perturbed quantum Hamiltonian are mapped to the dynamics of 1D classical gas. We show that our framework coincides with the results of the classical Landau-Zener transitions upon linearisation. Furthermore, we determine the effects of ex…
Superconducting circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) architecture composed of superconducting qubit and resonator is a powerful platform for exploring quantum physics and quantum information processing. By employing techniques developed for superconducting quantum computing, we experimentally investigate phase-sensitive Landau-Zener-Stückelberg (LZS) interference phenomena in a circuit QED. Our experiments cover a large range of LZS transition parameters, and demonstrate the LZS induced Rabi-like oscillation as well as phase-dependent steady-state population.
Constructing a universal operation scheme for Majorana qubits remains a central issue for the topological quantum computation. We study the Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interference in a Majorana qubit and show that this interference can be used to achieve controllable operations. The Majorana qubit consists of an rf SQUID with a topological nanowire Josephson junction which hosts Majorana bound states. In the SQUID, a magnetic flux pulse can drive the quantum evolution of the Majorana qubit. The qubit experiences two Landau-Zener transitions when the amplitude of the pulse is tuned around the sup…
We analyze dynamics of a quantum particle in a square lattice in the Hall configuration beyond the single-band approximation. For vanishing gauge (magnetic) field this dynamics is defined by the inter-band Landau-Zener tunneling, which is responsible for the phenomenon known as the electric breakdown. We show that in the presence of a gauge field this phenomenon is absent, at least, in its common sense. Instead, the Landau-Zener tunneling leads to appearance of a finite current which flows in the direction orthogonal to the vector of a potential (electric) field.
We study Landau-Zener dynamics in a double quantum dot filled with two electrons, where the spin states can become correlated with charge states and the level velocity can be tuned in a time-dependent fashion. We show that a correct interpretation of experimental data is only possible when finite-time effects are taken into account. In addition, our formalism allows the study of partial adiabatic dynamics in the presence of phonon-mediated hyperfine relaxation and charge-noise-induced dephasing. Our findings demonstrate that charge noise severely impacts the visibility of Landau-Zener-Stückelb…
