Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 14, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Fast optimal frictionless atom cooling in harmonic traps: shortcut to adiabaticity
Xi Chen1, A Ruschhaupt, S Schmidt
1Departamento de Química-Física, UPV-EHU, Apartado 644, 48080 Bilbao, Spain.
Abstract:
A method is proposed to cool down atoms in a harmonic trap without phase-space compression as in a perfectly slow adiabatic expansion, i.e., keeping the same populations of instantaneous levels in the initial and final traps, but in a much shorter time. This may require that the harmonic trap become transiently an expulsive parabolic potential. The cooling times achieved are shorter than those obtained using optimal-control bang-bang methods and real frequencies.
Related Concept Videos
Adiabatic Processes for an Ideal Gas
Equilibrium Conditions for a Particle
To understand the concept of equilibrium, let us first consider the forces acting on an object. When different forces act on an object, they can...
Atomic Spectroscopy: Effects of Temperature
At thermal equilibrium, the relative populations of excited and ground state atoms can be estimated using the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. For example, an increase in temperature from...
Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy: Atomization Methods
Kinetic Theory of an Ideal Gas
The number of molecules in one mole is called Avogadro's number...
Path Between Thermodynamics States

