Quantum Adiabatic Theorem Revisited

Abstract: In 2004 Ambainis and Regev formulated a certain form of quantum adiabatic theorem and provided an elementary proof which is especially accessible to computer scientists. Their result is achieved by discretizing the total adiabatic evolution into a sequence of unitary transformations acting on the quantum system. Here we continue this line of study by providing another elementary and shorter proof with improved bounds. Our key finding is a succinct integral representation of the difference between the target and the actual states, which yields an accurate estimation of the approximation error. Our proof can be regarded as a "continuous" version of the work by Ambainis and Regev. As applications, we show how to adiabatically prepare an arbitrary qubit state from an initial state.