Spatio-temporal quenches for fast preparation of ground states of critical models*

The difficulty of preparing highly entangled quantum states poses an important challenge in engineering artificial quantum systems for the purposes of computation and simulation. Adiabatic methods which slowly evolve unentangled states to entangled states are typically slow and particularly fail at criticality where the gap between eigenstates vanishes. The search for novel non-adiabatic methods for quantum state preparation is a topic of current research interest, and immense experimental relevance. I will describe the state of the art in the field and discuss our proposal(s) using spatio-temporal quenches to efficiently prepare the ground states of arbitrary interacting critical theories in one dimension and beyond.