Counterdiabatic Driving under Variational Frame Dressing

Abstract

Counterdiabatic (CD) driving accelerates adiabatic protocols by prescribing auxiliary control fields, but often fails to map them to physically available operations. We derive a general formalism for such a mapping. We formulate CD driving in a variational dressed frame, where an unconstrained auxiliary generator reshapes the effective adiabatic problem while simultaneously forcing the applied correction to stay restricted to the native laboratory controls. This yields a laboratory-frame commutator equation that can be solved without constructing instantaneous eigenstates or the adiabatic and dressed-frame unitaries. The additional dressed-frame freedom reveals solutions that are inaccessible in the conventional adiabatic frame. We illustrate this mechanism in three settings: suppression of spectator errors in a multi-qubit chain driven by a single quadrature, an analytical acceleration of adiabatic Bell-state preparation with a fixed entangling interaction, and implementation of a fast adiabatic holonomic gate in a degenerate tripod manifold with correction pulses confined to the native couplings. Our results provide a systematic nonperturbative framework for constructing implementable counterdiabatic protocols beyond the conventional adiabatic frame.