Avoided crossings of level pairs with opposite slopes can form potential energy curves for the external degree of freedom of quantum particles. We investigate nonadiabatic decay of metastable states on such avoided crossings (MSACs) using diabatic and adiabatic representations. The system is described by a single scaled adiabaticity parameter, $V$. The time-independent two-component Schrödinger equation is solved in both representations, and the nonadiabatic lifetimes of MSACs are determined from a wave-function flux calculation and from the Breit-Wigner formula, leading to four lifetime values for each MSAC. We also solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation in both pictures and derive the MSAC lifetimes from wave-function decay. The sets of six non-perturbative values for the MSAC lifetimes agree well, validating the approaches. As the adiabaticity parameter $V$ is increased by about a factor of ten, the MSAC character transitions from marginally to highly stable, with the lifetimes increasing by about ten orders of magnitude. The $ν$-dependence of the lifetimes in several regimes is discussed. Time-dependent perturbation theory is found to yield approximate lifetimes that deviate by $\lesssim 30\%$ from the non-perturbative results, while predictions based on the semi-classical Landau-Zener tunneling equation are found to be up to a factor of twenty off, over the ranges of $V$ and $ν$ studied. The results are relevant to numerous atomic and molecular systems with quantum states on intersecting, coupled potential energy curves.
We investigate the nonadiabatic dynamics of a driven spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate in both weak and strong driven force. It is shown that the standard Landau-Zener (LZ) tunneling fails in the regime of weak driven force and/or strong spin-orbital coupling, where the full nonadiabatic dynamics requires a new mechanism through multichannel effects. Beyond the semiclassical approach, our numerical and analytical results show an oscillating power-law decay in the quantum limit, different from the exponential decay in the semiclassical limit of the LZ effect. Furthermore, the condensa…
We study a quantum Otto cycle that uses a 2-qubit working substance whose Hamiltonian does not commute with itself at different times during unitary strokes. We investigate how the cycle responds to the loss of quantum adiabaticity when these strokes are operated with a finite duration. We find that qualitative features such as the possibility of counter-rotating cycles operating as heat engines, or a cycle efficiency that can increase with a decrease in the temperature difference between the baths, are resilient even to highly nonadiabatic strokes. However, cycle efficiency rapidly decreases,…
The physical implementation of holonomic quantum computation is challenging due to the needed complex controllable interactions in multilevel quantum systems. Here we propose to implement nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation with conventional capacitive coupled superconducting transmon qubits. A universal set of holonomic gates is constructed with the help of the interaction with an auxiliary qubit rather than relying on delicate control over an auxiliary level of multilevel quantum systems. Explicitly, these quantum gates are realized by tunable interactions in an all-resonant way, whic…
We propose a method for controlling the decoherence of a driven qubit that is strongly coupled to a reservoir, when the qubit resonance frequency is close to a continuum edge of the reservoir spectum. This strong-coupling regime is outside the scope of existing methods of decoherence control. We demonstate that an appropriate sequence of nearly abrupt changes of the resonance frequency can protect the qubit state from decay and decoherence more effectively than the intuitively obvious alternative, which is to fix the resonance well within a forbidden bandgap of the reservoir spectrum, as far a…
Coherent control of complex quantum systems is a fundamental requirement in quantum information processing and engineering. Recently developed notion of shortcut to adiabaticity (STA) has spawned intriguing prospects. So far, the most experimental investigations of STA are implemented in the ideal thermal gas or the weakly interacting ultracold Bose gases. Here we report the first demonstration of a many-body STA in a 3D anisotropically trapped unitary Fermi gas. A new dynamical scaling law is demonstrated on such a strongly interacting quantum gas. By simply engineering the frequency aspect r…
Streaking of photoelectrons has long been used for the temporal characterization of attosecond extreme ultraviolet pulses. When the time-resolved photoelectrons originate from a coherent superposition of electronic states, they carry an additional phase information, which can be retrieved by the streaking technique. In this contribution we extend the streaking formalism to include coupled electron and nuclear dynamics in molecules as well as initial coherences and demonstrate how it offers a novel tool to monitor non-adiabatic dynamics as it occurs in the vicinity of conical intersections and …
We review a time-dependent version of the Schrieffer-Wolff transformation that accounts for real-time control of system parameters, soon to be rendered possible on a broad basis due to technical progress. The dispersive regime of $N$ multilevel systems coupled to a cavity via a Jaynes-Cummings interaction is extended to the most general case. As a concrete example we rigorously apply the technique to dispersive two-qubit gates in a superconducting architecture, showing that fidelities based on previous models are off by up to $10^{-2}$, which is certainly relevant for high-fidelity gates compa…
The Born-Oppenheimer (BO) approximation has shaped our understanding on molecular dynamics microscopically in many physical and chemical systems. However, there are many cases that we must go beyond the BO approximation, particularly when strong light-matter interactions are considered. Floquet theory offers a powerful tool to treat time-periodic quantum systems. In this overview, we briefly review recent developments on Floquet nonadiabatic dynamics, with a special focus on open quantum systems. We first present the general Floquet Liouville von-Neumann (LvN) equation. We then show how to con…
We study the influence of a thermal environment on a non-adiabatic spin-flip driving protocol of spin-orbit qubits. The driving protocol operates by moving the qubit, trapped in a harmonic potential, along a nanowire in the presence of a time-dependent spin-orbit interaction. We consider the harmonic degrees of freedom to be weakly coupled to a thermal bath. We find an analytical expression for the Floquet states and derive the Lindblad equation for a strongly non-adiabatically driven qubit. The Lindblad equation corrects the dynamics of an isolated qubit with Lamb shift terms and a dissipativ…
We demonstrate that a conditional wavefunction theory enables a unified and efficient treatment of the equilibrium structure and nonadiabatic dynamics of correlated electron-ion systems. The conditional decomposition of the many-body wavefunction formally recasts the full interacting wavefunction of a closed system as a set of lower dimensional (conditional) coupled `slices'. We formulate a variational wavefunction ansatz based on a set of conditional wavefunction slices, and demonstrate its accuracy by determining the structural and time-dependent response properties of the hydrogen molecule.…
We study the dynamics of a two-level system described by a slowly varying Hamiltonian and weakly coupled to the Ohmic environment. We follow the Bloch--Redfield perturbative approach to include the effect of the environment on qubit evolution and take into account modification of the spectrum and matrix elements of qubit transitions due to time-dependence of the Hamiltonian. This formalism is applied to two problems. (1) We consider a qubit, or a spin-1/2, in a rotating magnetic field. We show that once the rotation starts, the spin has a component perpendicular to the rotation plane of the fi…
We present evidence of metastable rare quantum-fluctuation switching for the driven dissipative Jaynes-Cummings oscillator coupled to a zero-temperature bath in the strongly dispersive regime. We show that single-atom complex amplitude bistability is accompanied by the appearance of a low-amplitude long-lived transient state, hereinafter called `dark state', having a distribution with quasi-Poissonian statistics both for the coupled qubit and cavity mode. We find that the dark state is linked to a spontaneous flipping of the qubit state, detuning the cavity to a low-photon response. The appear…
We investigate geometric phase (GP) effects in nonadiabatic transitions through a conical intersection (CI) in an N-dimensional linear vibronic coupling (ND-LVC) model. This model allows for the coordinate transformation encompassing all nonadiabatic effects within a two-dimensional (2D) subsystem while the other N-2 dimensions form a system of uncoupled harmonic oscillators identical for both electronic states and coupled bi-linearly with the subsystem coordinates. The 2D subsystem governs ultra-fast nonadiabatic dynamics through the CI and provides a convenient model for studying GP effects.…
The diagonal Born-Oppenheimer correction (DBOC) stems from the diagonal second derivative coupling term in the adiabatic representation, and it can have an arbitrary large magnitude when a gap between neighbouring Born-Oppenheimer (BO) potential energy surfaces (PESs) is closing. Nevertheless, DBOC is typically neglected in mixed quantum-classical methods of simulating nonadiabatic dynamics (e.g., fewest-switch surface hopping (FSSH) method). A straightforward addition of DBOC to BO PESs in the FSSH method, FSSH+D, has been shown to lead to numerically much inferior results for models containi…
We have obtained accurate ab initio quartet potentials for the diatomic metastable triplet helium + alkali-metal (Li, Na, K, Rb) systems, using all-electron restricted open-shell coupled cluster singles and doubles with noniterative triples corrections [CCSD(T)] calculations and accurate calculations of the long-range $C_6$ coefficients. These potentials provide accurate ab initio quartet scattering lengths, which for these many-electron systems is possible, because of the small reduced masses and shallow potentials that results in a small amount of bound states. Our results are relevant for u…
The spectroscopic properties of a single, tightly trapped atom are studied, when the electronic levels are coupled by three laser fields in an $N$-shaped configuration of levels, whereby a $Λ$-type level system is weakly coupled to a metastable state. We show that depending on the laser frequencies the response can be tuned from coherent population trapping at two-photon resonance to novel behaviour at three photon resonance, where the metastable state can get almost unit occupation in a wide range of parameters. For certain parameter regimes the system switches spontaneously between dissipati…
Recent experiments showed that the chemical reaction rate is modified, either increased or decreased, by strongly coupling a nuclear vibration mode to the single mode of an optical cavity. Herein we investigate how the rate of an electron-transfer reaction depends on the molecule-cavity coupling in the ultrastrong coupling regime, where the coupling strength is comparable in magnitude with both the vibrational and the cavity frequencies. We found two main factors that determine the modification of the reaction rate: the relative shifts of the energy levels induced by the coupling and the mixin…
