Realistic Shortcuts to Adiabaticity in Optical Transfer

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of implementing realistic shortcuts to adiabaticity in optical atom transfer by developing methods that produce practical, flexible trajectories accounting for boundary conditions and non-harmonic potentials.

Contribution

The authors introduce two methods to construct feasible STA trajectories for optical atom transfer, overcoming boundary condition issues and including non-harmonic potential effects.

Findings

Proposed methods produce realistic STA trajectories.

Experimental validation shows improved transfer performance.

Techniques accommodate non-harmonic confining potentials.

Abstract

Shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA) are techniques allowing rapid variation of the system Hamiltonian without inducing excess heating. Fast optical transfer of atoms between different locations is a prime example of an STA application. We show that the boundary conditions on the atomic position, which are imposed to find the STA trajectory, lead to highly non-practical boundary conditions for the optical trap. Our experimental results demonstrate that, as a result, previously suggested STA trajectories generally do not perform well. We develop and demonstrate two complementary methods that solve the boundary conditions problem and allow the construction of realistic and flexible STA movements. Our technique can also account for non-harmonic terms in the confining potential.