Shortcuts to adiabaticity in the strongly coupled regime: Nonadiabatic control of a unitary Fermi gas

A shortcut to adiabaticity (STA) guides the nonadiabatic dynamics of a quantum system towards an equilibrium state without the requirement of slow driving. We report a demonstration of a STA in a strongly coupled system, i.e., a three-dimensional anisotropic Fermi gas at unitarity. Exploiting the emergent conformal symmetry, the time dependence of the trap frequencies is engineered so that the final state in a nonadiabatic expansion or compression is stationary and free from residual excitations. The universal scaling dynamics is verified both in the noninteracting limit and at unitarity.