Shortcuts to adiabatic Thouless pumping

Abstract Topological effects, known for their robustness against considerable perturbation, disorder, and defects, are believed to promote emerging quantum technologies. However, topological enhancement and protection could play a crucial role within coherence time, out of which decoherence mostly washes out the quantum feature. It urges us to accelerate topological effects to achieve effective protection and optimal control of quantum information. Taking the prototypical Thouless pumping as an example, quantized transport of particles in a cyclic adiabatic evolution faces a challenge: slow driving may exceed the coherent time, while fast driving may break quantization. To address this dilemma, we propose to add a control Hamiltonian to speed up Thouless pumping using shortcuts to adiabaticity. Compared to traditional Thouless pumping, our fast pumping scheme not only enables a substantial reduction of pumping time up to 11 orders of magnitude, but also effectively suppresses wavepacket diffusion. Furthermore, we demonstrate the resilience of our protocol to moderate noise levels. Our study settles the notoriously critical problem toward practical quantum technologies by combining topological effects and quantum control.