Fighting Exponentially Small Gaps by Counterdiabatic Driving

We investigate the efficiency of approximate counterdiabatic driving (CD) in accelerating adiabatic passage through exponentially small gaps. First, we analyze a minimal spin-glass bottleneck model that is analytically tractable and exhibits both an exponentially small gap at the transition point and a change in the ground state that involves a macroscopic rearrangement of spins. Using the variational Floquet-Krylov expansion to construct CD terms, we find that while the formation of excitations is significantly suppressed, achieving a fully adiabatic evolution remains challenging. Extending our investigation to realistic NP-hard spin-glass problems -- specifically, the $3$-regular \textsc{Max Cut} and $3$-\textsc{XORSAT} -- we find again that local CD expansions lead to negligible improvements in the final ground state fidelity. These results highlight the limited impact of local CD methods in overcoming the bottlenecks associated with first-order quantum phase transitions. To address this limitation, we propose an alternative method, termed quantum brachistochrone counterdiabatic driving (QBCD), which employs the approximate full CD connecting the ground state and the first excited state at a single parameter value close to the critical point. In the minimal spin-glass model, QBCD enables exponentially faster adiabatic evolution than the local strategies. To alleviate the challenges of its experimental and classical implementation for realistic \textsc{NP}-hard problems, we exponentially reduce the non-locality of the QBCD Hamiltonian by sparsifying its matrix elements to the density of the local expansions. Despite this drastic simplification, sparsified QBCD maintains finite ground-state fidelity at driving times exponentially shorter than in local strategies and counterdiabatic optimized local driving (COLD).