Shortcut to adiabaticity in a Stern-Gerlach apparatus

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that using shortcut to adiabaticity techniques to design magnetic field profiles in a Stern-Gerlach apparatus significantly improves its performance, making it more compact and resilient to velocity dispersion, thereby enhancing quantum state transfer fidelity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method employing shortcut to adiabaticity for optimizing Stern-Gerlach devices, surpassing standard uniform magnetic field rotations.

Findings

Enhanced fidelity of quantum state transfer.

More compact and velocity dispersion-resistant setup.

Quantitative comparison showing resource efficiency.

Abstract

We show that the performances of a Stern-Gerlach apparatus can be improved by using a magnetic field profile for the atomic spin evolution designed through shortcut to adiabaticity technique. Interestingly, it can be made more compact - for atomic beams propagating at a given velocity - and more resilient to a dispersion in velocity, in comparison with the results obtained with a standard uniform rotation of the magnetic field. Our results are obtained using a reverse engineering approach based on Lewis-Riesenfeld invariants. We discuss quantitatively the advantages offered by our configuration in terms of the resources involved and show that it drastically enhances the fidelity of the quantum state transfer achieved by the Stern-Gerlach device.