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arXiv:0903.2568 · Physical Review A

Collisional cooling of ultracold-atom ensembles using Feshbach resonances

Ludwig Mathey, Eite Tiesinga, Paul S. Julienne, Charles W. Clark

Published Sep 8, 2009• 11 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose a cooling mechanism for ultracold fermionic atom ensembles, which capitalizes on the energy dependence of inelastic collisions near a Feshbach resonance. We first discuss a single magnetic resonance and find that the final temperature and cooling rate is limited by the resonance width. A concrete example for a $p$-wave resonance of $^{40}\text{K}$ is given. We then improve upon this setup by using both a sharp optical or radio-frequency-induced resonance and a broad magnetic resonance and show that one can improve upon temperatures reached with current technologies.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.80.030702

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We propose a cooling mechanism for ultracold fermionic atom ensembles, which capitalizes on the energy dependence of inelastic collisions near a Feshbach resonance. We first discuss a single magnetic resonance and find that the final temperature and cooling rate is limited by the resonance width. A concrete example for a ppp-wave resonance of 40K^{40}\text{K}40K is given. We then improve upon this setup by using both a sharp optical or radio-frequency-induced resonance and a broad magnetic resonance and show that one can improve upon temperatures reached with current technologies.
Abstract Evaporative cooling stands as the prevailing method for achieving ultracold temperatures in atomic systems. Current schemes of evaporation selectively remove the hotter atoms near the edge of the trap, as the hotter and colder atoms are distributed in different spatial regions of the trapping potential. However, a long-standing goal is to directly remove the higher momentum atoms, irrespective of their spatial distribution. For this purpose, we demonstrate collisional cooling for a 6Li Fermi gas through inelastic three-body recombination near a narrow Feshbach resonance. Such three-body recombination can induce either heating or cooling effects, and the decay of the quasi-bound Feshbach molecule stirs the hotter atoms away from the trapping potential. When the threshold energy of the Feshbach molecule exceeds the atom’s average kinetic energy of 3/2kBT, the cooling effect becomes more pronounced. Finally, we observe strong temperature dependence in this collisional cooling process, with greater efficiency achieved at lower temperatures.
We study ultracold three-body collisions of bosons and fermions when the interatomic interaction is tuned near a narrow Feshbach resonance. We show that the width of the resonance has a substantial impact on the collisional properties of ultracold gases in the strongly interacting regime. From our numerical and analytical analyses, we identify universal features dependent on the resonance width. Remarkably, we find that all inelastic processes near narrow resonances leading to deeply bound states in bosonic systems are suppressed, while those for fermionic systems are enhanced. As a result, narrow resonances present a scenario that is the reverse of that found for broad resonances, opening up the possibility of creating stable samples of ultracold bosonic gases with large scattering lengths.
In this thesis we explore ultracold atomic collisions in the vicinity of a magnetic Feshbach resonance located at 9.1 G, between 87Rb atoms in the |F = 2, mF = 1> and the |F =1, mF = 1> hyperfine states. We experimentally investigate the energy dependence of the enhancement of inelastic interaction in the neighborhood of this Feshbach resonance by analyzing the temperature dependence of a loss spectroscopy feature. An asymmetric widening of the resonance feature with respect to temperature is observed. We develop a simple model which captures these asymmetric line shapes through thermal averaging over the collision energy dependence of the Feshbach resonance. The energy dependence of the Feshbach interactions is further explored by colliding ultracold atomic samples at a fixed energy significantly above threshold using an optical trapping system; the elastic scattering enhancement analyzed by colliding the samples in free space, while for the inelastic measurements the collisions were carried out in trap. No conclusive resonant behavior could obtained for the elastic component of the 9.1 G resonance, however the inelastic scattering enhancement exhibited an anticipated shift.
We report on experiments investigating the collisional properties of atoms at ultralow collision energies using an all-optical atom collider. By using a pair of optical tweezers, we can manipulate two ultracold atom clouds and collide them together at energies up to three orders of magnitude larger than their thermal energy. Our experiments measure the scattering of 87 Rb, 40 K, and 40 K- 87 Rb collisions. The versatility of our collider allows us to probe both shape resonances and Feshbach resonances in any partial wave. As examples, we present experiments demonstrating p-wave scattering with indistinguishable fermions, inelastic scattering at non-zero energies near a homonuclear Feshbach resonance, and partial wave interference in heteronuclear collisions.
We optimize a collision-induced cooling process for ultracold atoms in the nondegenerate regime. It makes use of a Feshbach resonance, instead of rf radiation in evaporative cooling, to selectively expel hot atoms from a trap. Using functional minimization we analytically show that for the optimal cooling process the resonance energy must be tuned such that it linearly follows the temperature. Here, optimal cooling is defined as maximizing the phase-space density after a fixed cooling duration. The analytical results are confirmed by numerical Monte Carlo simulations. In order to simulate more realistic experimental conditions, we show that background losses do not change our conclusions, while additional nonresonant two-body losses make a lower initial resonance energy with nonlinear dependence on temperature preferable.
Abstract Ultracold atoms prepared in excited internal states can escape from the trap through inelastic collisions. A magnetic field can be used to suppress the s-wave loss rate coefficient near an s-wave Feshbach resonance. However, at the temperature of μK the p-wave loss rate coefficient becomes increasingly important as the temperature increases. The unsuppressed p-wave loss rate coefficient can far exceed the suppressed s-wave loss rate coefficient, and severely restricts the reduction of the total loss rate coefficient. We calculate the collision rate coefficients of ultracold 85Rb and 87Rb atoms prepared in excited hyperfine and Zeeman states using the coupled-channel method. We find that in R b 85 ( F 1 = 3 , m F 1 = 3 ) + R b 87 ( F 2 = 1 , m F 2 = − 1 ) and R b 85 ( F 1 = 2 , m F 1 = − 2 ) + R b 87 ( F 2 = 2 ,