Fast atomic transport without vibrational heating

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to rapidly transport atoms in a trap without inducing vibrational heating by using dynamical invariants to engineer trap trajectories, applicable to both harmonic and anharmonic potentials.

Contribution

It introduces an invariant-based inverse engineering approach for fast atomic transport that avoids vibrational heating, extending previous methods and addressing anharmonic traps.

Findings

Achieves fast transport without vibrational excitation in harmonic traps.

Proposes compensation techniques for anharmonic traps.

Analyzes limitations related to energy, geometry, and acceleration.

Abstract

We use the dynamical invariants associated with the Hamiltonian of an atom in a one dimensional moving trap to inverse engineer the trap motion and perform fast atomic transport without final vibrational heating. The atom is driven non-adiabatically through a shortcut to the result of adiabatic, slow trap motion. For harmonic potentials this only requires designing appropriate trap trajectories, whereas perfect transport in anharmonic traps may be achieved by applying an extra field to compensate the forces in the rest frame of the trap. The results can be extended to atom stopping or launching. The limitations due to geometrical constraints, energies and accelerations involved are analyzed, as well as the relation to previous approaches (based on classical trajectories or "fast-forward" and "bang-bang" methods) which can be integrated in the invariant-based framework.