Global adiabatic criterion for fast topological photon transfer in Fock-state lattices

Abstract: Topological state transfer in Fock-state lattices has been demonstrated with high speed using sinusoidal profiles of coupling, yet the underlying reason has remained unclear. A global adiabatic criterion (GAC) is developed to bound the infidelity by the mean and variance of the nonadiabatic factor. The GAC reveals that the key to fast transfer is not a constant energy gap but the vanishing nonadiabaticity variance. For power-law coupling profiles, the variance vanishes only for the sinusoidal shape, which is thus globally optimal. Incorporating experimental decoherence parameters, it is predicted that the optimal transfer duration for a five-photon state is 161 ns, far shorter than 600 ns used in the experiment, reducing time by over 73% while increasing transferred photons by 29%. The optimal duration follow a simple linear scaling with photon number, providing a practical guideline. Through constructing an alternative constant-gap coupling family, it is confirmed that a constant gap alone is not sufficient for fast topological photon transfer. The essential condition is uniformity of nonadiabaticity. This work offers a rigorous explanation for the observed speed and a general framework for fast topological photonics engineering.