Smooth bang-bang shortcuts to adiabaticity for atomic transport in a moving harmonic trap

Abstract: Bang-bang control is often used to implement a minimal-time shortcut to adiabaticity for efficient transport of atoms in a moving harmonic trap. However, drastic changes of the on-off controller, leading to high transport-mode excitation and energy consumption, become infeasible under realistic experimental conditions. To circumvent these problems, we propose smooth bang-bang protocols with near-minimal time, by setting the physical constraints on the relative displacement, speed, and acceleration between the mass center of the atom and the trap center. We adopt Pontryagin's maximum principle to obtain the analytical solutions of smooth bang-bang protocol for near-time-minimal control. More importantly, it is found that the energy excitation and sloshing amplitude are significantly reduced at the expense of operation time. We also present a multiple shooting method for the self-consistent numerical analysis. Finally, this method is applied to other tasks, e.g., energy minimization, where obtaining smooth analytical form is complicated.