  Brownian escape is key to a wealth of physico-chemical processes, including
polymer folding, and information storage. The frequency of thermally activated
energy barrier crossings is assumed to generally decrease exponentially with
increasing barrier height. Here, we show experimentally that higher, fine-tuned
barrier profiles result in significantly enhanced escape rates in breach of the
intuition relying on the above scaling law, and address in theory the
corresponding conditions for maximum speed-up. Importantly, our barriers end on
the same energy on which they start. For overdamped dynamics, the achievable
boost of escape rates is, in principle, unbounded so that the barrier
optimization has to be regularized. We derive optimal profiles under two
different regularizations, and uncover the efficiency of N-shaped barriers. We
then demonstrate the viability of such a potential in automated microfluidic
Brownian dynamics experiments using holographic optical tweezers and achieve a
doubling of escape rates compared to unhindered Brownian motion. Finally, we
show that this escape rate boost extends into the low-friction inertial regime.
