Optimal Control Technique for Many-Body Quantum Dynamics

We present an efficient strategy for controlling a vast range of nonintegrable quantum many-body one-dimensional systems that can be merged with state-of-the-art tensor network simulation methods such as the density matrix renormalization group. To demonstrate its potential, we employ it to solve a major issue in current optical-lattice physics with ultracold atoms: we show how to reduce by about 2 orders of magnitude the time needed to bring a superfluid gas into a Mott insulator state, while suppressing defects by more than 1 order of magnitude as compared to current experiments T. Stöferle et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 130403 (2004). Finally, we show that the optimal pulse is robust against atom number fluctuations.