Realistic shortcuts to adiabaticity in optical transfer

• Published in: New journal of physics Vol. 20; no. 9; pp. 95002 - 95012
• Main Authors: Ness, Gal, Shkedrov, Constantine, Florshaim, Yanay, Sagi, Yoav
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 12.09.2018
• Subjects: Adiabatic flow; Boundary conditions; Fermi gases; optical transfer; Physics; Polynomials; quantum gases; shortcuts to adiabaticity
• ISSN: 1367-2630; 1367-2630
• DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/aadcc1

Shortcuts to adiabaticity are techniques allowing rapid variation of the system Hamiltonian without inducing excess heating. Fast optical transfer of atoms between different locations is an important application of shortcuts to adiabaticity. We show that the common boundary conditions on the atomic position, which are imposed to find the driving trajectory, lead to highly non-practical boundary conditions for the optical trap. Our experimental results demonstrate that, as a result, previously suggested trajectories are likely to fall short of the expectation. We develop two complementary methods that solve this boundary conditions problem by adding more degrees of freedom to the trajectory parameter space. In the first method, this is achieved by the addition of a spectral component at the trapping frequency, while in the second we use a polynomial trajectory of an order high enough to account for the new boundary conditions. We experimentally demonstrate that this approach allows us to construct highly non-adiabatic movements with no residual sloshing. Our techniques can also account for non-harmonic terms in the confining potential.