2010/12/07 by Dionisis Stefanatos, Justin Ruths, Jr-Shin Li · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.82.063422
published as Phys. Rev. A, Vol. 82, 063422, 2010 · This paper has been submitted to Phys. Rev. A since 13/09/2010
arxiv created 2010/12/07 · arxiv updated 2015/05/20
In this article we formulate frictionless atom cooling in harmonic traps as a time-optimal control problem, permitting imaginary values of the trap frequency for trasient time intervals during which the trap becomes an expulsive parabolic potential. We show that the minimum time solution has "bang-bang" form, where the frequency jumps suddenly at certain instants and then remains constant, and calculate estimates of the minimum cooling time for various numbers of such jumps. A numerical optimization method based on pseudospectral approximations is used to obtain suboptimal realistic solutions without discontinuities, which may be implemented experimentally.