Different methods have been recently put forward and implemented experimentally to inverse engineer the time-dependent Hamiltonian of a quantum system and accelerate slow adiabatic processes via nonadiabatic shortcuts. In the “transitionless quantum driving” proposed by Berry, shortcut Hamiltonians are designed so that the system follows exactly, in an arbitrarily short time, the approximate adiabatic path defined by a reference Hamiltonian. A different approach is based on first designing a Lewis-Riesenfeld invariant to carry the eigenstates of a Hamiltonian from specified initial to final configurations, again in an arbitrary time, and then constructing from the invariant the transient Hamiltonian that connects these boundary configurations. We show that the two approaches, apparently quite different in form and so far in results, are, in fact, strongly related and potentially equivalent, so that the inverse-engineering operations in one of them can be reinterpreted and understood in terms of the concepts and operations of the other one. We study, as explicit examples, expansions of time-dependent harmonic traps and the state preparation of two-level systems.

• Received 16 February 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.83.062116