Realizing Shortcuts to Adiabaticity in optical transfer of ultracold atoms

Shortcuts to Adiabaticity (STA) refers to a class of schemes enabling the fast variation of a system
Hamiltonian while still reaching a specific target state. They are based on cleverly tailoring the fast driving
protocol such that the system reaches the desired final state without being adiabatic. Yet, the experimental
implementation of STA suffers from an inherent problem arising from the fact that these driving profiles are
suited for the atoms trajectory as in practice the trap coordinate is the controlled one. In this seminar I will
present the experimental realization of these STA schemes for optical transfer of ultracold atoms. I will show
that in order to lift conflicting boundary conditions or to cope with non-ideal spatial control, it is necessary
to increase the number of degrees of freedom in the trajectory. We develop and demonstrate two
complementary methods to achieve this; the first acts as a “correction” to the original trajectory, while in
the second approach the trajectory is redesigned to account for all boundary conditions. Using both methods
we demonstrate successful transports of cold atoms in highly nonadiabatic regime