Encircling exceptional points as a non-Hermitian extension of rapid adiabatic passage
J. Feilhauer, A. Schumer, Jörg Doppler, Alexei A. Mailybaev, Johannes Böhm, Ulrich Kuhl, Nimrod Moiseyev, Stefan Rotter
Abstract
The efficient transfer of excitations between different levels of a quantum system is a task with many applications. Among the various protocols to carry out such a state transfer in driven systems, rapid adiabatic passage (RAP) is one of the most widely used. Here we show both theoretically and experimentally that adding a suitable amount of loss to the driven Hamiltonian turns a RAP protocol into a scheme for encircling an exceptional point including the chiral state transfer associated with it. Our work thus discloses an intimate connection between a whole body of literature on RAP and recent studies on the dynamics in the vicinity of an exceptional point, which we expect to serve as a bridge between the disjoint communities working on these two scenarios.