Numerically Optimizing Shortcuts to Adiabaticity: A Hybrid Control Strategy

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 1 Apr 2026] Numerically Optimizing Shortcuts to Adiabaticity: A Hybrid Control Strategy Bo Xing, Jesús G. Parejo, Sofía Martínez-Garaot, Paola Cappellaro, Mikel Palmero Achieving fast, excitation-free quantum control is a vital challenge in modern quantum technologies. In many cases, shortcuts to adiabaticity enable fast adiabatic-like protocols, yet determining control parameters that satisfy practical constraints is often challenging in complex systems. Here, we combine an analytical shortcut to adiabaticity approach with several numerical optimization methods to boost the performance of the protocol. As a proof-of-principle for this hybrid approach, we study a particularly intricate control problem, the separation of two trapped ions. We show that this analytical-numerical approach, along with the physical insight gained through the variety of suboptimal solutions, leads to the exploration of new solutions in a complex landscape that yield improvements of up to 3 orders of magnitude. Moreover, this improvement comes with no additional cost from an experimental point of view. Comments: 24 pages, 9 figures Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Mathematical Physics (math-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2604.01301 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2604.01301v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.01301 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Mikel Palmero [view email] [v1] Wed, 1 Apr 2026 18:05:32 UTC (1,207 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: math math-ph math.MP References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)