Contributor info: Dr Thomas Fogarty

Thomás Fogarty, Lewis Ruks, Jing Li, Thomas Busch

SciPost Phys. 6, 021 (2019) · published 8 February 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We design and explore a shortcut to adiabaticity (STA) for changing the interaction strength between two ultracold, harmonically trapped bosons. Starting from initially uncorrelated, non-interacting particles, we assume a time-dependent tuning of the inter-particle interaction through a Feshbach resonance, such that the two particles are strongly interacting at the end of the driving. The efficiency of the STA is then quantified by examining the thermodynamic properties of the system, such as the irreversible work, which is related to the out-of-equilibrium excitations in the system. We also quantify the entanglement of the two-particle state through the von Neumann entropy and show that the entanglement produced in the STA process matches that of the desired target state. Given the fundamental nature of the two-atom problem in ultracold atomic physics, the presented shortcut can be expected to have significant impact on many processes that rely on inter-particle interactions.