Environment-Assisted Shortcuts to Adiabaticity

Envariance is a symmetry exhibited by correlated quantum systems. Inspired by this “quantum fact of life,” we propose a novel method for shortcuts to adiabaticity, which enables the system to evolve through the adiabatic manifold at all times, solely by controlling the environment. As the main results, we construct the unique form of the driving on the environment that enables such dynamics, for a family of composite states of arbitrary dimension. We compare the cost of this environment-assisted technique with that of counterdiabatic driving, and we illustrate our results for a two-qubit model.