Robust population transfer of spin states by geometric formalism

Abstract: Accurate population transfer of uncoupled or weakly coupled spin states is crucial for many quantum information processing tasks. In this paper, we propose a fast and robust scheme for population transfer which combines invariant-based inverse engineering and geometric formalism for robust quantum control. Our scheme is not constrained by the adiabatic condition and therefore can be implemented fast. It can also effectively suppress the dominant noise in spin systems, which together with the fast feature guarantees the accuracy of the population transfer. Moreover, the control parameters of the driving Hamiltonian in our scheme are easy to design because they correspond to the curvature and torsion of a three-dimensional visual space curve derived by using geometric formalism for robust quantum control. We test the efficiency of our scheme by numerically simulating the ground-state population transfer in $^{15}$N nitrogen vacancy centers and comparing our scheme with stimulated Raman transition, stimulated Raman adiabatic passage and conventional shortcuts to adiabaticity based schemes, three types of popularly used schemes for population transfer. The numerical results clearly show that our scheme is advantageous over these previous ones.