Experimental acceleration of the spin transition in a nitrogen-vacancy center

Shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA) enables fast and robust coherent control of quantum system, which has been well placed in quantum technologies. In particular, inverse-engineering STA provides much more freedom for the optimization of shortcut, which alleviates the complexity for experimental realization. Here, we implement a STA technique, known as invariant-based inverse engineering, to speed up the adiabatic control of the electron triplet ground state of a single nitrogen-vacancy (N-$V$) center. The microwave pulses to drive inversely engineered STA are obtained with space-curve quantum control, where the evolution of spin transition is mapped to a three-dimensional closed space curve and the design of shortcut is obtained by optimization over the space curve. We demonstrate the fast and high-fidelity drive of dipole-forbidden transition between two spin sublevels of the ground state. Moreover, we demonstrate the robustness of the spin transition by introducing the detuning of driving microwave field. The acceleration and robustness is further confirmed by the comparison with two traditional Raman control schemes. Our results suggest invariant-based inverse engineering is powerful for fast and robust manipulation of N-$V$ system, and thus benefits quantum sensing and quantum computation based on the N-$V$ platform.