Time-optimal variational control of a bright matter-wave soliton

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments, we present the time-optimal variational control of bright matter-wave soliton trapped in a quasi-one-dimensional harmonic trap by manipulating the atomic attraction through Feshbach resonances. More specially, we first apply a time-dependent variational method to derive the motion equation for capturing the soliton's shape, and secondly combine inverse engineering with optimal control theory to design the atomic interaction for implementing time-optimal decompression. Since the time-optimal solution is of bang-bang type, the smooth regularization is further adopted to smooth the on-off controller out, thus avoiding the heating and atom loss, induced from magnetic field ramp across a Feshbach resonance in practice.