Shortcuts to adiabaticity in the strongly-coupled regime: nonadiabatic control of a unitary Fermi gas

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a shortcut to adiabaticity in a strongly interacting unitary Fermi gas, enabling rapid, excitation-free state transfer through trap frequency engineering, with implications for quantum control and thermodynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dynamical scaling law for strongly interacting quantum gases and experimentally realizes a many-body shortcut to adiabaticity in a unitary Fermi gas.

Findings

Successful adiabatic transfer of many-body states without excitation

Verification of universal scaling laws in strongly interacting gases

Potential applications in quantum engineering and thermodynamics

Abstract

Coherent control of complex quantum systems is a fundamental requirement in quantum information processing and engineering. Recently developed notion of shortcut to adiabaticity (STA) has spawned intriguing prospects. So far, the most experimental investigations of STA are implemented in the ideal thermal gas or the weakly interacting ultracold Bose gases. Here we report the first demonstration of a many-body STA in a 3D anisotropically trapped unitary Fermi gas. A new dynamical scaling law is demonstrated on such a strongly interacting quantum gas. By simply engineering the frequency aspect ratio of a harmonic trap, the dynamics of the gas can be manipulated and the many-body state can be transferred adiabatically from one stationary state to another one in short time scale without the excitation. The universal scaling both for non-interacting and unitary Fermi gas is also verified. This could be very important for future many-body quantum engineering and the exploration of the fundamental law of the thermodynamics.