Geometric phase for adiabatic evolutions of general quantum states.

The concept of a geometric phase (Berry's phase) is generalized to the case of noneigenstates, which is applicable to both linear and nonlinear quantum systems. This is particularly important to nonlinear quantum systems, where, due to the lack of the superposition principle, the adiabatic evolution of a general state cannot be described in terms of eigenstates. For linear quantum systems, our new geometric phase reduces to a statistical average of Berry's phases. Our results are demonstrated with a nonlinear two-level model.