Thermal bath Engineering for Swift Equilibration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a protocol for rapid equilibration of an overdamped harmonic oscillator by engineering the thermal bath and confinement parameters, demonstrated experimentally with significant speed-up.

Contribution

It presents a novel method combining confinement and temperature control to achieve swift equilibration, advancing reservoir engineering techniques.

Findings

Achieved two orders of magnitude reduction in equilibration time.

Experimentally validated the protocol with an optically trapped Brownian particle.

Demonstrated potential for application in nano-system reservoir engineering.

Abstract

We propose a new protocol that ensures the fast equilibration of an overdamped harmonic oscillator by a joint time-engineering of the confinement strength and of the effective temperature of the thermal bath. We demonstrate experimentally the effectiveness of our protocol with an optically trapped Brownian particle and report an equilibrium recovering time reduced by about two orders of magnitude compared to the natural relaxation time. Our scheme paves the way towards reservoir engineering in nano-systems.