Accelerated adiabatic quantum gates: Optimizing speed versus robustness

We develop protocols for high-fidelity single-qubit gates that exploit and extend theoretical ideas for accelerated adiabatic evolution. Our protocols are compatible with qubit architectures where direct transitions between logical states are either vanishingly small or nonexistent; in such systems traditional approaches cannot be implemented. Prime examples are superconducting fluxonium qubits, which have highly localized states, and AMO systems, where there are no dipole allowed transitions between the ground states encoding the logical states. By using an accelerated adiabatic protocol we can enforce the desired adiabatic evolution while having gate times that are comparable to the inverse adiabatic energy gap (a scale that is ultimately set by the amount of power used in the control pulses). By modeling the effects of decoherence, we explore the trade-off between speed and robustness that is inherent to shortcuts-to-adiabaticity approaches.