Shortcuts to adiabaticity: suppression of pair production in driven Dirac dynamics

Abstract

Achieving effectively adiabatic dynamics in finite time is a ubiquitous goal in virtually all areas of modern physics. So-called shortcuts to adiabaticity refer to a set of methods and techniques that allow us to produce in a short time the same final state that would result from an adiabatic, infinitely slow process. In this paper we generalize one of these methods—the fast-forward technique—to driven Dirac dynamics. As our main result we find that shortcuts to adiabaticity for the $(1+1)$-dimensional Dirac equation are facilitated by a combination of both scalar and pseudoscalar potentials. Our findings are illustrated for two analytically solvable examples, namely charged particles driven in spatially homogeneous and linear vector fields.