Inverse engineering for robust state transport along a spin chain via low-energy subspaces

Abstract

Quantum state transfer plays a central role in the field of quantum computation and communication, but its quality will be deteriorated by the ubiquitous variations and noise in quantum systems. Here we propose robust and nonadiabatic protocols for transmitting quantum state across a strongly coupled spin chain, especially when the unwanted disorders exist in the couplings. To this end, we approximately map the low-energy subspaces of the odd-size Heisenberg chain to a two-level system, and derive the sensitivity of the final fidelity under systematic deviations or time-varying fluctuations. Subsequently, utilizing the flexibility of the inverse-engineering technique, we optimize the state-transfer robustness with respect to these two kinds of perturbations, respectively. The resulting schemes allow for more stable quantum-state transfer than the original accelerated schemes and only require manipulating the two boundary couplings instead of the whole system, which open up the possibility of fast and robust information transfer on spin-based quantum systems.