Inconsistency of the theory of geometric phases in adiabatic evolution
Da-Jian Zhang, P. Z. Zhao, Guofu Xu · Physical Review A · 2022
We unveil that even an infinitesimal deviation of the initial state from the eigenstates of the initial Hamiltonian can yield a significant change in the geometric phase accompanying adiabatic evolution without degeneracies of the energy levels. This leads to the counterintuitive result that the values of two geometric phases computed from the general definition of the Berry phase [Samuel and Bhandari, Phys. Rev. Lett. 60, 2339 (1988)] can dramatically differ from each other in the adiabatic limit even if their evolution paths are sufficiently close in a pointwise manner. The result of this work indicates that the widely accepted theory of geometric phases is not very consistent in the context of adiabatic evolution involving superposed eigenstates.