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arXiv:1412.8473 · Physical Review A

Optimization of collisional Feshbach cooling of an ultracold nondegenerate gas

Marlon Nuske, Eite Tiesinga, Ludwig Mathey

Published Apr 20, 2015• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.91.043626

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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 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 measure the scaling laws for the number of atoms and the cloud size as a function of trap depth for evaporative cooling of a unitary Fermi gas in an optical trap. A unitary Fermi gas comprises a trapped mixture of atoms in two hyperfine states which is tuned to a collisional (Feshbach) resonance using a bias magnetic field. Near resonance, the zero energy s-wave scattering length diverges, and the s-wave scattering cross-section is limited by unitarity to be 4π/ k 2 , where k is the relative wavevector of the colliding particles. In this case, the collision cross-section for evaporation scales inversely with the trap depth, enabling runaway evaporation under certain conditions. We demonstrate high evaporation efficiency, which is achieved by maintaining a high ratio η of trap depth to thermal energy as the trap depth is lowered. We derive and demonstrate a trap lowering curve which maintains η constant for a unitary gas. This evaporation curve yields a quantum degenerate sample from a classical gas in a fraction of a second, with only a factor of three loss in atom number.
Three-body recombination is a phenomenon common in atomic and molecular collisions, producing heating in the system. However, we find the cooling effect of the three-body recombination of a 6Li Fermi gas near its s-wave narrow Feshbach resonance. Such counter-intuitive behavior is explained as follows, the threshold energy of the quasi-bounded Feshbach molecule acts as the knife of cooling, expelling the scattering atoms with selected kinetic energy from the trap. When the threshold energy happens to be larger than 3/2kBT, each lost atom in the three-body recombination process has more than 3kBT energy which results in cooling. The best cooling is found with the threshold energy set at about 3kBT, consistent with a theoretical model. The three-body recombination induced cooling raises potential applications for cooling complex atomic systems.
Abstract Reaching ultracold temperatures within hybrid atom–ion systems is a major limiting factor for control and exploration of the atom–ion interaction in the quantum regime. In this work, we present results on numerical simulations of trapped ion buffer gas cooling using an ultracold atomic gas in a large number of experimentally realistic scenarios. We explore the suppression of micromotion-induced heating effects through optimization of trap parameters for various radio-frequency (rf) traps and rf driving schemes including linear and octupole traps, digital Paul traps, rotating traps and hybrid optical/rf traps. We find that very similar ion energies can be reached in all of them even when considering experimental imperfections that cause so-called excess micromotion. Moreover we look into a quantum description of the system and show that quantum mechanics cannot save the ion from micromotion-induced heating in an atom–ion collision. The results suggest that buffer gas cooling can be used to reach close to the ion’s groundstate of motion and is even competitive when compared to some sub-Doppler cooling techniques such as Sisyphus cooling. Thus, buffer gas cooling is a viable alternative for ions that are not amenable to laser cooling, a result that may be of interest for studies into cold controlled quantum chemistry and charged impurity physics.
This thesis has investigated the dynamics of ultracold atomic collisions in the presence of both static magnetic and oscillating radio-frequency (rf) fields. The bound state structure and scattering length of 39K+133Cs was examined in the presence of only a static magnetic field, where it was found that no Feshbach resonance of suitable width for magnetoassociation existed at a magnetic field where caesium can be cooled to degeneracy. We then showed that zero-energy Feshbach resonances may be engineered using an rf field in places where they did not previously exist. An rf field with frequency 79.9 MHz was chosen to induce a resonance near 21 G. The widths of such rf-induced Feshbach resonances increase quadratically with rf field strength. The resonances presented are lossless with circularly polarized rf, and the molecules created are long-lived even with plane-polarized RF. Collisional losses in rf-dressed magnetic traps were also investigated. An rf-induced loss mechanism that does not exist in the absence of rf radiation was identified. This mechanism is not suppressed by a centrifugal barrier in the outgoing channel, and can be much faster than spin relaxation, which is centrifugally suppressed. We explore the dependence of the rf-induced loss rate on singlet and triplet scattering lengths, hyperfine splittings and the strength of the rf field. The results were interpreted in terms of an adiabatic model of the collision dynamics, and calculate the corresponding nonadiabatic couplings. The loss rate can vary by 10 orders of magnitude as a function of singlet and triplet scattering lengths. 87Rb is a special case, where several factors combine to reduce rf-induced losses; as a result, they are slow compared to spin-relaxation losses. For most other alkali-metal pairs, rf-induced losses are expected to be much faster and may dominate. For heteronuclear mixtures an rf-modified spin-exchange mechanism was identified that results in loss rates orders of magnitude greater than the rf-induced loss rates in homonuclear cases. Fast loss is expected in mixtures where the Lande g-factors differ.
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.