Reversibility of Nonequilibrium Dynamics in a Unitary Fermi Gas
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arXiv: 2611.00563v1 · Summary page
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A quantum round trip needs the right timing
Returning a trap to its original shape does not necessarily return the particles inside it to their original state. In a strongly interacting Fermi gas initially out of equilibrium, researchers combine theory and experiment to identify an additional requirement: the accumulated dynamical phase must complete a whole number of cycles. They demonstrate reversibility by taking an optical trap through a round trip.
The work identifies reversible routes based on scaling symmetry and on shortcuts to adiabaticity, protocols designed to control a system without requiring slow evolution. Unlike the equilibrium case, the allowed round-trip durations are discrete. This makes timing a physical condition for undoing the evolution, not merely an engineering preference—a useful distinction for controlling quantum many-body systems driven far from equilibrium.
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