Adiabatic Preparation of Many-Body Quantum States: Getting the Beginning and the End Right
Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 130602 – Published 22 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/hnlr-hm29
Abstract
We present numerical calculations, and simulations performed on a Rydberg atom quantum simulator, of the adiabatic evolution of closed many-body quantum systems around a quantum phase transition. We demonstrate that the end-to-end transfer error, for a given process duration, can be suppressed by adopting smooth initial and final scheduling functions for the Hamiltonian. We consider a one-dimensional mixed-field Ising model, as well as a chain of Rydberg atoms, and compare numerical calculations and results on a commercially available quantum computer for the end-to-end transfer error with different schedule functions. We provide a new rigorous proof under minimal regularity assumptions of the known result that if the time dependent Hamiltonian is times differentiable with vanishing first to th order derivatives in the beginning and in the end, the infidelity with respect to the final adiabatic eigenstate scales as when evolving for time .