Trigonometric protocols for shortcuts to adiabatic transport of cold atoms in anharmonic traps

Shortcuts to adiabaticity have been proposed to speed up the “slow” adiabatic transport of ultracold atoms. Their realizations, using inverse engineering protocols, provide families of trajectories with appropriate boundary conditions. These trajectories can be optimized with respect to the operation time and the energy input. In this paper we propose trigonometric protocols for fast and robust atomic transport, taking into account cubic or quartic anharmonicities of the trapping potential. Numerical analysis demonstrates that this choice of the trajectory minimizes the final residual energy efficiently, and shows extraordinary robustness against anharmonic parameters. These results might be of interest for the state-of-the-art experiments on ultracold atoms and ions.