Adiabatic driving and parallel transport for parameter-dependent Hamiltonians

Abstract

We use the Van Vleck-Primas perturbation theory to study the problem of parallel transport of the eigenvectors of a parameter-dependent Hamiltonian. The perturbative approach allows us to define a non-Abelian connection $\mathcal{A}$ that generates parallel translation via unitary transformation of the eigenvectors. It is shown that the connection obtained via the perturbative approach is an average of the Maurer-Cartan 1-form of the one-parameter subgroup generated by the Hamiltonian. We use the Yang-Mills curvature and the non-Abelian Stokes' theorem to show that the holonomy of the connection $\mathcal{A}$ is related to the Berry phase.