Delta-kick cooling is a technique employed to achieve low kinetic temperatures by decreasing momentum width at the cost of increased position width. In an ideal implementation, this method uses a harmonic potential to deliver a single near-instantaneous momentum kick. In practice, potentials that are approximately harmonic near their center are commonly used. As a result, the breakdown of the harmonic approximation far from the center limits the cooling performance. Inspired by aberration cancellation in optics, we propose to use compound matter-wave lens systems for $\delta \text{−}\mathrm{kick}$ cooling with Gaussian potentials. By strategically combining attractive and repulsive kicks, we show that it is possible to mimic the effect of a harmonic potential. For a test case with reasonable experimental parameters, our method suggests a reduction in kinetic temperature by a factor of 2.5 using a two-pulse sequence and by a factor of 3.2 using a three-pulse sequence.

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• Atom interferometry
• Atom optics
• Bose-Einstein condensates
• Ultracold gases
• Atom & ion cooling