Antonio Prados

Departamento de Física Atómica, Molecular y Nuclear
Universidad de Sevilla, Spain

Swift state-to-state transformations in stochastic systems

When: 12:00-13:00 CET, July 17th (Monday), 2023

Where: Seminar Room, ICMM-CSIC, Campus de Cantoblanco, Madrid

In the last years, there has been a great interest in the possibility of accelerating the connection between given initial and final states. The field was started with the idea of “shortcuts to adiabaticity” (STA) in the quantum framework, in which the general goal was to obtain the adiabatic evolution but in a finite time—by driving the system with an additional term in the Hamiltonian. Several techniques have been proposed to achieve this goal: inverse engineering, counter-diabatic driving, fast-forward, to name a few [1]. Both the idea of accelerating the connection between states and the techniques employed have later been transposed to stochastic systems, mainly trying to find shortcuts for the relaxation between equilibrium states. Since “adiabatic” has the meaning of zero-heat in thermodynamics, the term “swift state-to-state transformations” (SST) has been proposed to encompass all the protocols that aim at accelerating the connection in stochastic systems [2]. This is done by tailoring the time evolution of physical properties that control the time evolution of the system of interest, e.g. the stiffness of a harmonic trap or the temperature of the thermal bath—i.e. the control functions. Once the feasibility of connecting in a finite time is shown, there appears the problem of optimising it in a certain sense: connection time, dissipation, or other figures of merit. This makes it necessary, in general, to resort to optimal control theory to find the optimal time protocol for the control functions. The above general ideas will be illustrated with several examples of stochastic systems.

[1] D. Guéry-Odelin, A. Ruschhaupt, A. Kiely, E. Torrontegui, S. Martínez-Garaot, and J. G. Muga. Rev. Mod. Phys. 91, 045001 (2019).
[2] D. Guéry-Odelin, C. Jarzynski, C. A. Plata, A. Prados, and E. Trizac, Driving rapidly while remaining in control: classical shortcuts from Hamiltonian to stochastic dynamics, Rep. Prog. Phys. 86, 035902 (2023).