Atom laser dynamics in a tight-waveguide

We study the transient dynamics that arise during the formation of an atom laser beam in a tight waveguide. During the time evolution the density profile develops a series of wiggles which are related to the diffraction in time phenomenon. The apodization of matter waves, which relies on the use of smooth aperture functions, allows to suppress such oscillations in a time interval, after which there is a revival of the diffraction in time. The revival time scale is directly related to the inverse of the harmonic trap frequency for the atom reservoir.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, to be published in the Proceedings of the 395th WE-Heraeus Seminar on "Time Dependent Phenomena in Quantum Mechanics ", organized by T. Kramer and M. Kleber (Blaubeuren, Germany, September 2007

Two-fluid evolving Lorentzian wormholes

We investigate the evolution of a family of wormholes sustained by two matter components: one with homogeneous and isotropic properties $\rho(t)$ and another inhomogeneous and anisotropic $\rho_{in}(t,r)$. The rate of expansion of these evolving wormholes is only determined by the isotropic and homogeneous matter component $\rho(t)$. Particularly, we consider a family of exact two-fluid evolving wormholes expanding with constant velocity and satisfying the dominant and the strong energy conditions in the whole spacetime. In general, for the case of vanishing isotropic fluid $\rho(t)$ and cosmological constant $\Lambda$ the space expands with constant velocity, and for $\rho(t)=0$ and $\Lambda \neq 0$ the rate of expansion is determined by the cosmological constant. The considered here two-fluid evolving wormholes are a generalization of single fluid models discussed in previous works of the present authors [Phys.\ Rev.\ D {\bf 78}, 104006 (2008); Phys.\ Rev.\ D {\bf 79}, 024005 (2009)].Comment: 8 pages, to be published in Phys. Rev

Scaling-up quantum heat engines efficiently via shortcuts to adiabaticity

The finite-time operation of a quantum heat engine that uses a single particle as a working medium generally increases the output power at the expense of inducing friction that lowers the cycle efficiency. We propose to scale up a quantum heat engine utilizing a many-particle working medium in combination with the use of shortcuts to adiabaticity to boost the nonadiabatic performance by eliminating quantum friction and reducing the cycle time. To this end, we first analyze the finite-time thermodynamics of a quantum Otto cycle implemented with a quantum fluid confined in a time-dependent harmonic trap. We show that nonadiabatic effects can be controlled and tailored to match the adiabatic performance using a variety of shortcuts to adiabaticity. As a result, the nonadiabatic dynamics of the scaled-up many-particle quantum heat engine exhibits no friction and the cycle can be run at maximum efficiency with a tunable output power. We demonstrate our results with a working medium consisting of particles with inverse-square pairwise interactions, that includes noninteracting and hard-core bosons as limiting cases.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; typo in Eq. (51) fixed. Feature paper in the Special Issue "Quantum Thermodynamics" edited by Prof. Dr. Ronnie Koslof