Encircling exceptional points as a non-Hermitian extension of rapid adiabatic passage

The efficient transfer of excitations between different levels of a quantum system is a task with many applications. Among the various protocols to carry out such a state transfer in driven systems, rapid adiabatic passage (RAP) is one of the most widely used. Here we show both theoretically and experimentally that adding a suitable amount of loss to the driven Hamiltonian turns a RAP protocol into a scheme for encircling an exceptional point including the chiral state transfer associated with it. Our work thus discloses an intimate connection between a whole body of literature on RAP and recent studies on the dynamics in the vicinity of an exceptional point, which we expect to serve as a bridge between the disjoint communities working on these two scenarios.