Inhomogeneous quasi-adiabatic driving of quantum critical dynamics in weakly disordered spin chains

We introduce an inhomogeneous protocol to drive a weakly disordered quantum spin chain quasi-adiabatically across a quantum phase transition and minimize the residual energy of the final state. The number of spins that simultaneously reach the critical point is controlled by the length scale in which the magnetic field is modulated, introducing an effective size that favors adiabatic dynamics. The dependence of the residual energy on this length scale and the velocity at which the magnetic field sweeps out the chain is shown to be nonmonotonic. We determine the conditions for an optimal suppression of the residual energy of the final state and show that inhomogeneous driving can outperform conventional adiabatic schemes based on homogeneous control fields by several orders of magnitude.