Adiabatic passage and geometric phases: are they hot or not?

 

In this informal seminar I will present an appraisal of adiabatic passage which transforms quantum states much better than one should expect (and I will explain why this is the case). And I will discuss an often stated claim that geometric phases, used in many  gate proposals for quantum computing, are particularly robust because of their geometric character (and I will explain why I think this is not the case).