Engineering fast and stable splitting of matter waves

TL;DR

This paper introduces shortcuts to adiabaticity for splitting matter waves, enabling fast, stable, and robust division of Bose-Einstein condensates without excitation, outperforming traditional slow or fast methods.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel shortcut to adiabaticity approach tailored for matter wave splitting, enhancing stability and speed in BEC manipulations compared to existing techniques.

Findings

Shortcuts enable rapid splitting without excitations.

The method is more stable due to BEC non-linearity.

Fast splitting maintains coherence and stability.

Abstract

When attempting to split coherent cold atom clouds or a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) by bifurcation of the trap into a double well, slow adiabatic following is unstable with respect to any slight asymmetry, and the wave "collapses" to the lower well, whereas a generic fast chopping splits the wave but it also excites it. Shortcuts to adiabaticity engineered to speed up the adiabatic process through non-adiabatic transients, provide instead quiet and robust fast splitting. The non-linearity of the BEC makes the proposed shortcut even more stable.