Floquet-engineered quantum state preparation in a noisy qubit

The ability to manipulate quantum states is important to many areas of quantum science including quantum simulation and computation. Adiabatic evolution is a common strategy for preparing quantum states, but it is slow and susceptible to decoherence. Existing methods for speeding up adiabatic evolution require complex multi-qubit gates or are difficult to construct for many-qubit systems. Our approach for constructing approximate fast-forward (FF) protocols uses the tools of Floquet engineering utilizing only the interactions in the original Hamiltonian. We apply this approach to a two level system and demonstrate it experimentally using the electronic spin of a Nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. We show that our Floquet-engineered FF protocol performs comparably to the conventional FF protocol, achieving target state preparation with an upper bound on infidelity (1-F) of 0.01 at the 1σ level. We study the performance of our protocol when external noise acts on the qubit and find that it is significantly more robust than the conventional FF protocol.