Robust coupled-waveguide devices using shortcuts to adiabaticity

Shortcuts to adiabaticity, originally developed in the context of quantum control, are powerful tools for the design of high coupling efficiency, robust, and short coupled-waveguide devices. The counterdiabatic protocol cancels the unwanted coupling in system evolution by the addition of a counterdiabatic term. The invariant-based inverse-engineering approach designs system evolution using the decoupled eigenstates of the Lewis-Riesenfeld invariant. The single-shot shaped-pulse technique directly parameterizes the solution of the coupled-mode equation. Starting from the counterdiabatic protocol, we show that these seemingly very different shortcuts to adiabaticity techniques are equivalent in the framework of coupled-waveguide systems. When combined with perturbation treatment of the coupled-mode equation, robust coupled-waveguide devices against errors can be obtained. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America