  The quantum adiabatic method, which maintains populations in their
instantaneous eigenstates throughout the state evolution, is an established and
often a preferred choice for state preparation and manipulation. Though it
minimizes the driving cost significantly, its slow speed is a severe limitation
in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era technologies. Since adiabatic
paths are extensive in many physical processes, it is of broader interest to
achieve adiabaticity at a much faster rate. Shortcuts to adiabaticity
techniques which overcome the slow adiabatic process by driving the system
faster through non-adiabatic paths, have seen increased attention recently. The
extraordinarily long lifetime of the long-lived singlet states (LLS) in nuclear
magnetic resonance, established over the past decade, has opened several
important applications ranging from spectroscopy to biomedical imaging. Various
methods, including adiabatic methods, are already being used to prepare LLS. In
this article, we report the use of counterdiabatic driving (CD) to speed up LLS
preparation with faster drives. Using NMR experiments, we show that CD can give
stronger LLS order in shorter durations than conventional adiabatic driving.

Quantum Physics;Chemical Physics