Shortcut to adiabaticity in a Stern-Gerlach apparatus
François Impens, David Guéry-Odelin · Physical Review A · 2017
We show that the performances of a Stern-Gerlach apparatus can be improved by using a magnetic field profile for the atomic spin evolution designed with the shortcut-to-adiabaticity technique. Interestingly, it can be made more compact, for atomic beams propagating at a given velocity, and more resilient to a dispersion in velocity in comparison with the results obtained with a standard uniform rotation of the magnetic field. Our results are obtained using a reverse-engineering approach based on Lewis-Riesenfeld invariants. We discuss quantitatively the advantages offered by our configuration in terms of the resources involved and show that it drastically enhances the fidelity of the quantum state transfer achieved by the Stern-Gerlach device.