The corrections to the STIRAP pulses required to produce a superadiabatic transfer are determined with a fidelity equal to one in a three-level system.

Light-matter interaction and understanding the fundamental physics behind is essential for emerging quantum technologies. Solid-state devices may explore new regimes where coupling strengths are “ultrastrong”, i.e., comparable to the energies of the subsystems. New exotic phenomena occur the common root of many of them being the fact that the entangled vacuum contains virtual photons. They herald the lack of conservation of the number of excitations which is the witness of ultrastrong coupling breaking the U(1) symmetry. Despite more than a decade of research, the detection of ground-state virtual photons still awaits demonstration. In this work, we recognize the “conspiring” set of experimental challenges and show how to overcome them, thus providing a solution to this long-standing problem. We find that combining a superinductor-based unconventional “light fluxonium” qudit and coherent control yields a highly efficient, faithful, and selective conversion of virtual photons into real ones. This enables their detection with resources available to present-day quantum technologies.

The difficulty in combining high fidelity with fast operation times and robustness against sources of noise is the central challenge of most quantum control problems, with immediate implications for the realization of quantum devices. We theoretically propose a protocol, based on the widespread stimulated Raman adiabatic passage technique, which achieves these objectives for quantum state transfers in generic three-level systems. Our protocol realizes accelerated adiabatic following through the application of additional control fields on the optical excitations. These act along frequency sidebands of the principal adiabatic pulses, dynamically counteracting undesired transitions. The scheme facilitates experimental control, not requiring new hardly-accessible resources. We show numerically that the method is efficient in a very wide set of control parameters, bringing the timescales closer to the quantum speed limit, also in the presence of environmental disturbance. These results hold for complete population transfers and for many applications, e.g., for realizing quantum gates, both for optical and microwave implementations. Furthermore, extensions to adiabatic passage problems in more-level systems are straightforward.

We analyze the efficiency of protocols for adiabatic quantum state transfer assisted by an engineered reservoir. The target dynamics is a quantum trajectory in the Hilbert space and is a fixed point of a time-dependent master equation in the limit of adiabatic dynamics. We specialize to quantum state transfer in a qubit and determine the optimal schedule for a class of time-dependent Lindblad equations. The speed limit on state transfer is extracted from a physical model of a qubit coupled to a reservoir, from which the Lindblad equation is derived in the Born-Markov limit. Our analysis shows that the resulting efficiency is comparable to the efficiency of the optimal unitary dynamics. Numerical studies indicate that reservoir-engineered protocols could outperform unitary protocols outside the regime of the Born-Markov master equation, namely, when correlations between the qubit and reservoir become relevant. Our study contributes to the theory of shortcuts to adiabaticity for open quantum systems and to the toolbox of protocols of the NISQ era.