On the power of coherently controlled quantum adiabatic evolutions

We provide a new approach to adiabatic state preparation that uses coherent control and measurement to average different adiabatic evolutions in ways that cause their diabatic errors to cancel, allowing highly accurate state preparations using less time than conventional approaches. We show that this new model for adiabatic state preparation is polynomially equivalent to conventional adiabatic quantum computation by providing upper bounds on the cost of simulating such evolutions on a circuit-based quantum computer. Finally, we show that this approach is robust to small errors in the quantum control register and that the system remains protected against noise on the adiabatic register by the spectral gap.