Research:Adiabatic Methods For Quantum Computing

"Talk of dynamic compression and adiabatic gradients didn't carry as much weight as the certainty of its conscious intent." - Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day

The word "adiabatic" has an etymology from ancient Greek, meaning, roughly "impassable." In thermodynamics this word was used to denote the condition of not allowing heat into the system. As often happens in etymology, however, the word adiabatic morphed into a new usage with the advent of quantum theory, where it refers to a system staying in a quantum state while properties of the physical system are altered. Thus adiabatic quantum evolutions are explicitly passable, in the sense that there is no obstacle to performing the evolution. Indeed this is the great benefit of adiabatic quantum evolutions: that when doing them the state "stays the same."

References

• D. Bacon and S.T. Flammia, Adiabatic Gate Teleportation, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 120504 (2009)
  • arXiv:0905.0901 published version
• D. Bacon and S.T. Flammia, Adiabatic Cluster State Quantum Computing, Phys. Rev. A, 82, 030303(R) (2010)
  • arXiv:0912.2098 published version